In the U.S., the biggest high-speed traders include Virtu Financial Inc., which filed in March to sell shares to the public. Bats Global Markets Inc., the Lenexa, Kansas-based equity exchange that merged with Direct Edge Holdings LLC this year, was founded by a high-frequency trader.

Book’s Hero

“We believe Lewis’s book can have a big impact on complex market-structure issues that have been simmering for years,” Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading LLC and a frequent critic of the status quo in markets, said before the “60 Minutes” interview was broadcast. “Hopefully this type of publicity will finally force regulators to take action on issues that they’ve been sitting on for way too long.”

One of the heroes of Lewis’s book is Brad Katsuyama, who left Royal Bank of Canada in 2012 to form a new market, IEX Group Inc., along with other former traders from the Toronto- based bank. David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital Inc. hedge fund invested in the platform, which started trading in October and was established to minimize the influence of predatory strategies, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has endorsed IEX and is the venue’s biggest broker.

Ticket Prices

IEX was established partly to address concern that technology advances and fragmentation have made the $22 trillion U.S. equity market too fast and opaque. The platform, a dark pool with ambitions to officially become an exchange, imposes a delay of 350 microseconds, or 350 millionths of a second, on orders -- enough to curb the fastest trading firms. IEX aims for greater transparency by making its trading rules available for public review, unlike some other electronic venues.

During his own interview with 60 Minutes, Katsuyama described how the stock market rips off investors. While still at Royal Bank, he noticed that prices seemed to move against him when he was trading.

“The best analogy I think is that your family wants to go to a concert,” he said. “You go onto StubHub, there’s four tickets all next to each other for 20 bucks each. You put in an order to buy four tickets, 20 bucks each and it says, ‘You’ve bought two tickets at 20 bucks each.’ And you go back and those same two seats that are sitting there have now gone up to $25.”

‘My Jaw’

Katsuyama concluded that his intentions became visible on some exchanges faster than others. The most fleet-footed traders could take advantage of that by submitting bids and offers on the slower markets.