Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Chapter 3 introduces Ronan Ryan, who like Katsuyama was a Wall Street outsider by virtue of both his Irish origins and temperament. Unlike Katsuyama, he craved a job on Wall Street but struggled to land one, instead accepting a job from a fellow Irishman with MCI Communications. His work was unsatisfying at first, but he soon took a liking to the details of communications technology and learned more about it than many of his superiors. He rose through the ranks of the telecommunications industry and attracted the notice of Wall Street firms, but they saw him as a technician rather than a financier. While working for a firm that specialized in securing Wall Street’s communications network against external disruption, he learned that firms were trying to optimize the speed of their transactions by factors of milliseconds. Ryan demonstrated to a Kansas City-based firm that distance still mattered by moving their computers to New Jersey and reducing the transit time of their trades by nearly 40 milliseconds. Ryan became highly sought-after among Wall Street firms as the leading expert on “proximity services.” Ryan helped relatively little-known high frequency traders outpace the big banks in optimizing their transaction times while disguising what they were doing.