Flash Boys Moral

One character in Flash Boys that is portrayed as moral is Brad Katsuyama. Brad started his career at the Royal Bank of Canada and did very well for himself. At RBC, Brad was able to establish himself as a good trader, but the bank itself attempted to do moral business. Early on, Brad comments that RBC had a “no-asshole rule” where the company turned down Wall Street guys that seemed to be typically obnoxious, thus giving RBC the nickname “RBC nice” (26). Later on, it became clear to Brad that most people working in this field had little “knowledge about high-frequency trading, he was not vain and did not focus too much on money. Even after the 2008 financial crisis when Brad thought about quitting Wall Street, he said that “his heart had been in his job, but mainly because he liked the people he worked for and the people who worked for him” (39). Still, he could not walk away because he saw that the markets were rigged and high-frequency traders were taking advantage of unsuspecting investors. He acted morally first at RBC by declining to open a dark pool which they could sell to high-frequency traders. From then on, he devoted his energy to

finding out how people gained speed advantages to the exchanges thus being able to front-run orders. Instead of trying to profit off of this discovery, he went out to find out as much as he could to ultimate negate these arbitrage opportunities. Not only did Brad leave his high paying job at RBC, he embodied his mission to create a fair market by opening his own stock exchange IEX.
Another character that was described as moral is Ronan Ryan. From his humble beginning as an Irish immigrant, Ronan showed his strong work ethic by going to work in the telecom industry. As he managed to be more knowledgeable about how information moved and the speed of signals as a function of distance, he eventually was offered a job on Wall Street by Brad. Once Ronan became the authority on the subject of “co- location” that enabled Wall Street proximity to the exchanges, he was the go-to man for “helping high-frequency traders to exploit the Americanization of foreign stock markets” (66). Yet, the reason why Ronan is still considered moral is that “a lot of what Ronan had seen and heard didn’t make sense to him: he didn’t know what he knew” (73). Even when Ronan knew things like Spread Network’s plan to sell line to high-frequency traders, he was under a non-disclosure agreement and could not talk about it until the NDA expired (83). Therefore, it reasonable to argue that once Ronan did understand what was going on (and could talk about it), he left his well-paying job to go with Brad to start the new exchange to combat market predators. In an industry where it is easy to be blinded by money, Ronan chose loyalty and clearly wanted to do the right thing for traders and investors.
Another character deemed moral in Flash Boys is John Schwall.

Coming from Bank of America, Schwall saw first hand (especially after the 2008 crisis) how corrupt Wall Street was “with no corporate loyalty to employers” and “a lot of unspoken animosity” (92). Schwall shared Brad’s angry at the rigged markets as he said: “as soon as you realize that you are not able to execute your orders because someone else is able to identify what you are trying to do and race ahead of you, it’s over” (95). He continued by stating that “people set out this way to make money from everyone else’s retirement account” that in turn hurt honest people like his parents (95). Schwall’s dedication to “figuring out who was doing the screwing” of the market is why he is revered along with the other characters as a moral fighter against unfair

trading.
Overall Brad seems to be the most moral character as his “unhappiness with Wall Street was starting to feel less like a business than a cause,” and he now found himself “educating the world’s biggest money managers about the inner workings of the stock market, which strongly suggested to him that no one else on Wall Street was willing to teach them how their investment dollars were being abused” (87-88).