Image: Tabitha Soren

Author Michael Lewis’ newest book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, topped  The New York Times bestseller list a week after release, and a screen version is rumored to be in the works with bigwig film producer Scott Rudin, whose long list of credits includes There Will Be Blood, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Lewis’ book about the Oakland A’s, Moneyball.

Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower traders, thereby acting before others can respond. Critics of the practice–Lewis chief among them–argue that high-frequency trading creates something akin to insider trading: a predatory environment for less advantaged investors. WIRED spoke with Lewis at an event organized by Live Talks in downtown Los Angeles.

WIRED: The central character in your book, Brad Katsuyama, calls today’s stock trading system “a Pandora’s box of ridiculousness.” What does he mean?

Lewis: Right now there’s vast amounts of financial intermediation that doesn’t need to happen. You have technology innovation being dreamed up to create misunderstanding, to create an advantage for insiders. What’s going on in the stock market is a reprisal of the madness that preceded the credit crisis, where you had people dreaming up instruments, like collateralized debt obligations, not to make the risks in our financial system more transparent, but to obscure them.

MORE @ http://www.wired.com/2014/04/michael-lewis-on-how-the-geeks-rigged-the-stock-market/