Why Felix Salmon Doesn't Like 'Flash Boys'

“Flash Boys” author Michael Lewis is one of Felix Salmon’s favorite writers.

“He is the best writer of nonfiction financial journalism in the world,” he said. “There’s really no doubt about that.”

Salmon is a senior editor at Fusion, former financial writer for Reuters and author of the Felix Salmon blog. He recently joined Benzinga’s #PreMarket Prep to explain his gripe with Lewis’ most recent book.

Salmon explained that he is not a fan of high frequency traders or high frequency trading.

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“I think that what they do is create really big and important systemic risk in the market that you have a huge amount of complexity in the market and complex systems fail in catastrophic and unexpected ways, and that’s a very bad thing,” he said.

But instead of focusing on that aspect, Salmon said the book claims that mom and pop retail investors are being ripped off and losing money as a result of high frequency trading. He said that’s just not true.

“If you’re a smaller, individual investor, you are the one, clear beneficiary of high frequency trading,” he explained. “Your orders are filled immediately at national best bid or offer, everything happens incredibly cheaply and you are unbelievably happy -- you’ve never had it so good.”

Instead, Salmon said very large institutional investors are the ones getting hurt by high frequency trading, and he doesn’t think ordinary, individual investors need to worry about getting ripped off.

He also talked about his transition from Reuters to Fusion and the future of the financial media.

Check out his full interview here:

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