Is 'Flash Boys' The Anti- 'Wolf of Wall Street'?

The Wolf of Wall Street was successful for many reasons: Leonardo DiCaprio starred, Martin Scorsese directed, and gratuitous amounts of naked women, drugs, lavish parties and un-PC behavior was showcased. But now, a novel that claims to be the "anti-Wolf of Wall Street", Flash Boys, will become a film. Novelist Michael Lewis has had several of his books transformed to the big screen, including The Blind Side and Moneyball. Two more, Liar’s Poker and The Big Short are in the works. And now he can add Flash Boys, a novel that's cover art boasts "a revolt against Wall Street" to the adaptation list.

The huge success of The Wolf of Wall Street makes us wonder how popular Flash Boys, which suggests the opposite story, could actually be. According to the book's synopsis, the film will be about:

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.

While the men of The Wolf of Wall Street were attempting to take advantage of the system, Flash Boys are the ones trying to uncover men like Jordan Belfort. Needless to say, the Flash Boys would not be invited to Belfort's yacht parties.

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