The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street
An Adaptation From ‘Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,’ by Michael Lewis

The simplest way to design a stock exchange that could not be gamed was 
to hire the very people best able to game it and encourage them to take 
their best shots. Katsuyama didn’t know any other national puzzle 
champions, but Puz did. The only problem was that none of them had ever 
worked inside a stock exchange. “The Puzzle Masters needed a guide,” 
Katsuyama says.

Enter Constantine Sokoloff, who had helped build Nasdaq’s matching 
engine — the computer that matched buyers and sellers. Sokoloff was 
Russian, born and raised in a city on the Volga River. He had an 
explanation for why so many of his countrymen wound up in high-frequency 
trading. The old Soviet educational system channeled people into math 
and science. And the Soviet-controlled economy was horrible and 
complicated but riddled with loopholes, an environment that left those 
who mastered it well prepared for Wall Street in the early 21st century. 
“We had this system for 70 years,” Sokoloff says. “The more you 
cultivate a class of people who know how to work around the system, the 
more people you will have who know how to do it well.”

full: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/flash-boys-michael-lewis.html
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