FLASH CRASH

A TRADING SAVANT, A GLOBAL MANHUNT, AND THE MOST MYSTERIOUS MARKET CRASH IN HISTORY

LIAM VAUGHAN

Wm Collins, 272pp, £20, ebook £9.99

From his bedroom in his parents’ modest house near Heathrow, Navinder Sarao, a 42-year-old stock trader, made tens of millions of dollars trading stocks – and was implicated in causing the ‘flash crash’ of 2010 when the US stock markets lost almost $1 trillion in value in a matter of minutes. He was, said Phillip Delves Broughton in the Telegraph, ‘the face of a revolution in stock trading’.

Liam Vaughan’s account of Sarao, his arrest in 2015 after a long international hunt and his part in the ‘flash crash’ was widely praised by reviewers. Many were impressed by how Vaughan teased out the many complicated moral questions around Sarao’s actions, and his interesting personality traits. Delves Broughton wrote: ‘He displayed a rare combination of high intelligence and extreme emotional control. “You’ve got to make your mind strong,” he told a friend. “Make your self-esteem high. Make yourself feel like you’re deserving of the money!”’

John Arlidge in the Sunday Times was impressed by the way Vaughan ‘makes you sympathise with a trader who on a good day clears £700,000 – almost 30 times more than the average Briton makes in a year. That’s because it turns out that Nav is not your typical vulgar show-me-themoney trader. Quite the opposite. He has no interest in getting filthy rich to lavish gifts on himself or others. ‘Material stuff is pointless,’ he says.

In the Spectator, Jay Elwes was also gripped by ‘an extremely well-researched and clearly written book which is also a reminder of the sheer oddity of the world of cuttingedge finance’. Sarao ‘disrupted some of the biggest, wealthiest and best politically connected financiers in the world, some of whom he regarded as cheats’. Elwes concluded that the reader couldn’t help but end up with some admiration for how Sarao ‘out-cheated the cheats’.