I (or, rather, my algorithms) then turn around and sell the shares to you for $10, and pocket the difference.Īll of this must take place within 16 milliseconds – the single flap of a hummingbird’s wing – in order to beat, by one millisecond, the other available systems. After you place your bid with an exchange in Kansas City for $10 a share, my superfast line allows me to race ahead of you to the New York Stock Exchange servers, where I purchase shares from someone offering a lower price. The strategy, as Anton explains to a cocktail waitress one lonely evening, is beguilingly straightforward: Let’s say you’re an investor looking to buy 1,000 shares in a Zimbabwean lemon company. It is he who persuades his cousin Anton (a bald Alexander Skarsgard, unrecognizable and impressively restrained) to leave the confines of an investment firm headed by Eva Torres (Salma Hayek), a rapacious trader who doesn’t take kindly to disloyalty.Īs Anton holes himself up in a Midwestern hotel working on the code that will run their trading transactions, Vincent follows his construction crews and their hulking machines up muddy hills and down verdant valleys (a Sikorsky helicopter makes a bone-shaking cameo), their heavy industry contrasting with the weightlessness of the digital processes that will actually power the bits and bytes. (Hello, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, etc.)Įisenberg dials back his familiar motor-mouth, playing Vincent as a striver with a protective streak whose blue-collar immigrant roots both nurture and haunt his every move. Lucky for us, because whatever film is made of Lewis’s book will likely be in the familiar Hollywood mould of Wall Street films: adrenalized, glossy and a celebration of either the street’s hedonistic titans or its rebellious misfits who use morality to deflect scrutiny from their own amoral motivations. As that book’s screen adaptation languished in development hell, Montreal filmmaker Kim Nguyen quietly made like his fictional protagonists and raced ahead, cranking out his own tale. His thrilling, galling Flash Boys (2014) demonstrated how some Wall Street types had devised a system that guaranteed profits by racing ahead of other traders and sniffing out their intentions. This is the world of high-frequency trading, but before you begin high-frequency nodding off, allow me to note that the subject was exhilarating enough to snare the interest of author Michael Lewis, who previously offered up the rollicking subprime mortgage bestseller The Big Short. In Wall Street movies, as on Wall Street itself, justice is relative. Vincent – and his cousin, the socially awkward computer-engineering savant Anton – may see themselves as underdogs with a moral mission, but their venture is backed by a deep-pocketed investor, and their business plan involves selling access to the superfast line to Masters of the Universe, who will use it to reinforce their holds on the world. Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) has just brought this man, Mark Vega (Michael Mando), into his confidence and employ as the chief engineer responsible for building a 1,600-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable, which will send data between Kansas City and New York Stock Exchange servers in New Jersey.
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