I just finished reading Trust by Hernan Diaz. My personal review is that had the book not received so many accolades, I would have stopped reading about page 200. It does build, both in story and in writing, but it takes a while.
Trust is the same story told four times, from four perspectives. The structure is interesting. I read another book recently for which structure was a main feature. Code 6 by James Grippando is the only book that I remember reading where the major plot twist comes in the first 50 pages. Having encountered alternative structures twice in two recent books, it makes me wonder if playing with structure is somehow attractive right now. It must be. I’ll agree that it’s different.
After four iterations, the financial aspect of Trust is arbitrage. The characters figures out that they can manipulate the 1920’s ticker tape by bombing the market with orders causing a delay in reporting. Later, they turned to influencing the clerks entering those orders, asking them to speed up or slow down. To be charitable, we could call this time arbitrage.
Realizing that Trust is fictional, time arbitrage is a method that has been used on Wall Street recently. A few years ago, some asset managers bought microwave communications systems to send orders to the exchanges faster than others could do it. Some traders have co-located at the exchanges to prevent time delays. Some algorithms are programmed to react to data in milliseconds to try to beat other algorithms doing the same. Some things on Wall Street seem to never change. Time arbitrage is one of them. It is one of the things that give me misgivings about markets. The biggest bankrolls with the biggest computers do have an advantage.
One of the other financial storylines in Trust also got my attention. Investors know that only 7 or 8 stocks have produced all of the market performance this year. The book also refers to a practice of running a few big stocks up or down as a method of controlling the market. That story is quite relatable to investors today.
To the credit of the author, I felt like I was reading some financial facts (not fictions) in the novel Trust. While I liked the finance, the structure of that book and some recent others seems gimmicky to me.