The new new thing

The new new thing: a Silicon Valley story / Michael Lewis, 269 pgs.

Jim Clark is described as "an American treasure," "insufferable," and "infuriating."  He is also the guy who headed three billion dollar businesses, and made his fortune by seeing what was coming and jumping on it way before there was a bandwagon and before anyone saw that he was right.  In depth and covering less of the economics that Lewis in known for, you get a look into Clark but what we see is so confusing, I'm not sure I learned much.  Still fun to read and hard to imagine, the idea of hopping into a helicopter with this guy is scary but Lewis never hesitated.

As I go back and re-read and read some for the first time, I'm still amazed at how Lewis can make seemingly any topic interesting to me.

Next: the future just happened

Next: the future just happened / Michael Lewis 236 pgs.

Well technically the future just happened in 2001 when this book was published.

This book talks about the Internet and a group of people who used it to do things they would not be able to do in person.  For example, the 14 year old Jonathan Lebed who made hundreds of thousands of dollars manipulating the stock market.  Fifteen year old Marcus Arnold who was ranked on AskMe.com for his answers to legal questions.  The band Marillion who crowd sourced a tour and CD production through their fan sight.

Most of this won't surprise anyone in 2014.  Crowd sourcing is mainstream now.  But reading it and thinking back to before everyone had Internet access, it really is very amazing.  Sometimes it is important to remember how much has changed in the information field.

Like all Michael Lewis books, this is a pleasure to read.

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis, 271 pages.

Lewis's latest look at Wall Street covers the post-2008 crash phenomenon of High Frequency Trading (HFT). The author was surprised to learn that many of the biggest banks and big trading companies allowed HFT firms to have access to their in-house "dark pools," and allowed those same firms to have the fastest fiber connections into and between their exchanges. This allowed the very smart, very high-tech HFT firms to have microsecond or nanosecond advance knowledge of big trades, giving them and their high-speed computers time to get ahead of the trade and make a fraction of a cent or so on every share traded. The author estimates that on each of the strategies that were discovered by the traders who gave him the info for the book, the HFT folk made at least a billion dollars per year. Interesting stuff. One of those eminently accessible works of nonfiction that has the pacing and plotting of a good solid novel, though that's no surprise since readable quick-paced nonfic is a specialty of Lewis.

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Flash Boys

Flash boys: A Wall Street revolt / Michael Lewis 274 pgs.

Arbitrage has always been a fact of life but now on Wall Street it has become a many billion dollar business that makes being a tech person a big deal.  It is all a matter of speed.  And we are talking milliseconds, not a measure we can really relate with. What will you do to gain a millisecond?  Lay your own fiber from Chicago to New York, try to locate your server as close to the "trading" computer as possible...even to the point of asking for a place IN THE ROOM that is closest to the door.

What does this mean to you and me?  We don't get the best prices when we buy stock.  I know that shocks you...you always assumed that Wall Street wanted to be fair to the small investor, didn't you?

As always Michael Lewis is a pleasure to read.

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The Richest Woman in America

The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach  304 pp.

I don't think I ever heard of Hetty Green until I read a review of this book. Henrietta Howland Robinson was born to a Quaker family who earned their money owning whaling ships. She learned about business from her father but he did not allow her to participate in his business ventures. She inherited several million dollars from her father and an aunt and, by her death in 1916, had increased her worth to about $200 million dollars (over $3 billion by today's equivalent). She married Edward Green, the son of a wealthy Vermont family, with a prenuptial agreement that he renounce all rights to her money. Hetty was careful about her investments and after bailing out her husband's bad business deals on more than one occasion, she separated from him but they never divorced. Through her shrewd and careful business dealings, Hetty weathered several of the serious economic panics in the late 19th and early 20th century. In spite of her wealth, she lived an extremely frugal life, moving frequently between boarding house and residential hotels to avoid paying taxes in any one location. She was often ridiculed in the press for her penchant for dowdy clothing, her frequent appearances in the courts for an abundance of lawsuits against others, and her restrictions on her daughter who did not marry until she was in her late thirties. Green was an interesting character.

This is a book worth reading but not because of the biographical information on Hetty Green. I found the most fascinating parts to be about the causes of the various "panics" and financial crises the country faced during her lifetime. Every one of them can be traced to situations similar to what caused our current financial troubles. Proof that Santayana was correct when he said "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I listened to the audiobook version and was rather disappointed in some of the mispronunciations and stumbles in the reading that were not corrected in editing. 

The Big Short

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine/Michael Lewis 266 pg.

Read this book if you are interested in the recent economic collapse precipitated by the "housing bubble" and the securities associated with the really lame mortgages banks were handing out. Michael Lewis does a great job of explaining exactly what happened. Unfortunately, after you read the book, you will realize what a nutso thing Wall Street is and wonder how if anyone grasps the craziness of the financial markets. You might not sleep very well for awhile, especially because you have decided to keep your money in your mattress. - Christa