Screen-based trading preserves mutual anticipation among algorithmic traders
Evidence
Caitlin Zaloom (2006) was one of the first scholars to show that a distinctive, screen-mediated sociality persisted even after the transition from open outcry to electronic and high-frequency trading at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Contemporary traders’ speculative communities provide a space for guesswork (that is, of what others value) but also for the continuous work of an “anonymous sociality” (LiPuma 2017) in financial markets. … Christian Borch’s (2012, 2020) recent ethnographic studies bear this out: the shift to screen-based speculation altered but didn’t altogether displace practices of mutual anticipation and social integration in algorithmic markets. The algorithmic trading room gives a new visual texture to these complex social routines through a wealth of graphical images, price charts, spread plots, and tree maps, which “become ways of navigating the uncertainty that quantitative modelling is unable to account for” (Beunza 2019, 284). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 427
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to reading on how markets are socially constructed; also echoes Simmel/urban-studies themes about categorical knowledge sustaining anonymous sociality. — connects to: Screen-based trading recreated rather than abolished trader sociality and mutual anticipation. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 427; Screen-based reciprocal observation can generate intersubjectivity across geographic distance in markets. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 60; Screen-based trading platforms mechanically enforce non-overlapping turn-taking among traders. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 111 (+3 more)
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 427