I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with Less Vegas on the cover. The Vegas story, by Joel Stein, is pretty great, by the way.
My column is an attempt to put the high frequency trading brouhaha in some historical context. And part of my historical context is Bernie Madoff. As so often happens, there were a couple of people I talked to who informed what I wrote, but didn’t make it into the column. In this case they’re probably glad not to have shown up in print next to Bernie M. They were Bob Gasser, CEO of brokerage/technology provider ITG, and Jamie Selway, a managing director at brokerage White Cap Trading. I also read the first quarter or so of Chris Welles’s great (and very long) 1975 book The Last Days of the Club to learn about how the stock market business used to work.