THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK

Mezrich delivers a knotty tale of the futures market and its discontents.

At the heart of the story are two characters whom we meet early on: “Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt weren’t household names,” writes Mezrich in prose that harkens to the new journalism of old, “but their product was spreading through households and dorm rooms at an exponential rate, like a phone-born virus powered by pixie dust, exceptional design, and more than a little triggered greed.” The product, arrived at after the two experienced pangs of remorse for “helping rich people get richer,” was an app, Robinhood, that allowed ordinary people to trade on the stock market without brokerage fees (and not much regulatory oversight, as it turns out). One stock that took Robinhood’s interest was coincidentally attracting the attention of hedge fund managers: GameStop, a company that seemed to lack much vision of how to position itself in a video game market that, while its products were digital, required physical players to interpret the software. The managers were betting against it, shorting the stock. The investors who came to the game—Tenev and Bhatt would later be damned for the “gamification of trading”—through the app drove it up to improbable heights, costing Wall Street billions. Mezrich’s story is a tangle, necessarily, since the author has to sort out many threads: the drive to “democratize” Wall Street on one hand, the opposite drive to keep trading out of the hands of amateurs on the other, and more. In the hands of Michael Lewis, the narrative might have been neater, and Mezrich lets a few key terms go by without adequate explication—for example, readers new to the notion of order flow trading may get lost. The takeaway, though, is that life is short and Wall Street complicated. In that world, the winners are few and the losers, legion.

A touch long and wobbly but just the thing for alt-finance geeks with background in trading language and practice.