Rituals and Illusions of the Trading Screen
Rituals and Illusions of the Trading Screen
This chapter examines the act of online trading itself—what it means, from the viewpoint of the trader, to use an online technology to conduct financial transactions. It analyzes what happens when traders place orders on their screens, how orders are handled within the infrastructure of electronic brokerages, and how traders perceive and make sense of their activities. While the orders placed by traders are not always matched against each other, the trading screen is geared toward producing a necessary illusion of relationality—that is, of traders relating to other traders. The chapter examines the types of actions that constitute trading and the ways in which they are shaped by the inherent relationality of the trading screen. Anchored in ethnographic observations, it investigates how various experiences of using the trading screen are articulated and how social hierarchies are produced in this process. Many ethnographies of financial trading have seen it as an egalitarian environment, where traders differ from each other based only on their skills. This chapter investigates how particular forms of trading are not egalitarian at all, but express in their setup hierarchical differences between retail traders, on the one hand, and traders claiming superior status, on the other.
Keywords: trading screen, observation, trading technology, currency markets, relationality, hierarchies
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
