You're like reading my mind. Flash Boys made me question everything he ever wrote. I happen to know a great deal about HFT, and Lewis was like a proto-GPT, espousing with great confidence things that were easily verifiably false. It made me wonder if all his books were just as ill-informed and my ignorance of the subject kept me from realizing it.
There's more of us it seems! I've been in HFT for the past 15 years and after reading Flash Boys I had to do a full 180 on Lewis. Every single book from him I now treat as mainly fiction sprinkled with some historical facts to maybe make it more relatable.
I don't even think it requires knowledge of HFT to see the flaw in the whole thing.
For example, the whole premise of the book was that banks would see 10,000 shares offered on 5 different exchanges. They'd go to buy 10,000, but only get filled on 2,000, and then cry foul. But people don't normally think like this. For example, if I wanted to sell my bike. I list it on Craigslist, Facebook and Next Door. If someone simultaneously contacted me through all three platforms, no one would expect that I was responsible for selling three bikes. Now, replace "bike" with "2,000 shares."
