Automating Finance
Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets

Explains how stock markets became automated through the work of invisible technologists, redefining the fabric of finance for the twenty-first century.

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (Author)

9781108496421, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 May 2019

370 pages, 23 b/w illus. 2 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm, 0.73 kg

'… the book is wide-ranging in both its theoretical inspirations and the empirical details it develops. What the book conveys extremely well is precisely how modern markets are produced by multiple moral, political, and organizational struggles.' Nahoko Kameo, American Journal of Sociology

Trading floors are a thing of the past. Thanks to a combination of computers, high-speed networks and algorithms, millions of financial transactions now happen in fractions of a second. This book studies the automation of stock markets in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, identifying the invisible actors, devices, and politics that were central to the creation of electronic trading. In addition to offering a detailed account of how stock exchanges wrestled with technology, the book also invites readers to rethink the nature of markets in modern societies. Markets, it argues, are sites for the creation of relations, and in studying how these relations changed through technology, the book highlights the sources, dynamics, and consequences of automation. In this respect, the book is both a history of automation in finance and a sociological analysis of the way in which automation gradually changed the lives and work of key financial actors.

Preface
1. Markets in milliseconds
2. Infrastructures of kinship
3. The power of invisibility
4. The hubris of platforms
5. The wizards of king street
6. Making moral markets
7. Rabbits guarding the lettuce
8. Infrastructures, kinship, and queues.

Subject Areas: Finance [KFF], Economic history [KCZ], International finance [KCLF]