**[An] extraordinary tale--Wall Street Journal
Compelling [and] engaging--Financial Times
Magnificently detailed yet pacy...Think Trading Places meets Wall
Street--Sunday Times (UK)
**
The riveting story of a trading prodigy who amassed $70 million from
his childhood bedroom--until the US government accused him of helping
trigger an unprecedented market collapse
On May 6, 2010, financial markets around the world tumbled
simultaneously and without warning. In the span of five minutes, a
trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became
known, represented what was then the fastest drop in market history.
When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around
the globe were left perplexed. What had they just witnessed?
Navinder Singh Sarao hardly seemed like a man who would shake the
world's financial markets to their core. Raised in a working-class
neighborhood in West London, Nav was a preternaturally gifted trader who
played the markets like a computer game. By the age of thirty, he had
left behind London's trading arcades, working instead out of his
childhood home. For years the money poured in. But when lightning-fast
electronic traders infiltrated markets and started eating into his
profits, Nav built a system of his own to fight back. It worked--until
2015, when the FBI arrived at his door. Depending on whom you ask, Sarao
was a scourge, a symbol of a financial system run horribly amok, or a
folk hero who took on the tyranny of Wall Street and the high-frequency
traders.
A real-life financial thriller, Flash Crash uncovers the remarkable,
behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying market crash, a
globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and a man at the
center of them both.
