Flash Crash

'The UK's pre-eminent chronicler of financial crime' New Yorker For fans of Bad Blood and Flash Boys, the story of a trading prodigy who amassed $70 million from his childhood bedroom-until the US government accused him of helping trigger an unprecedented market collapse. On May 6, 2010, financial markets around the world tumbled simultaneously and without warning. In the span of five minutes, a trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became known, represented the fastest drop in market history. When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around the globe were left perplexed. What had they just witnessed? Navinder Singh Sarao hardly seemed like a man who would shake the world's financial markets to their core. Raised in a working-class neighbourhood in West London, Nav was a preternaturally gifted trader who played the markets like a computer game. By the age of thirty, he had left behind London's "trading arcades," working instead out...