Retired traders buy personal market screens to restore lost identity.

Evidence

There is a domain “out there” to which traders belong, as market participants and market makers; traders want to be connected and want to keep track of this domain. When traders leave their job and are no longer connected, they may feel that they have been stripped of part of their selves—and may buy little handheld Reuters screens to reconnect themselves, however tenuously. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures, 71

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls how subscription to the market becomes part of selfhood — parallel to patterns in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s protagonist’s market-embedded identity, and to addiction framings of trading in contemporary commentary.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the source evidence for this handheld Reuters habit — is it from Abolafia’s interviews, and how anecdotal is it?

Related

• Trader identity depends on continuous connection to the market domain (similarity 0.86)