How Noise Matters to Finance

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Nicholas A. Knouf

As scores of crises over the past century have shown, the stock market is manipulable and manipulated. The market is composed of human-made machines, which are affected by a lack of predictability more fundamental than the human: the noise of the material world. N. Adriana Knouf draws on historical and contemporary documents to show how noise—sonic, informatic, or otherwise—affects the ways in which financial markets function. How Noise Matters to Finance draws on different forms of financial noise, paying attention to how materiality and the interference of humans and machines causes the meanings of noise to shift over space and time.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Genres: Finance, Economics

88 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 6, 2016

Reviews

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tiny, mind-blowing book.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book-length essay on noise, signal, and the functioning of capital markets—provocative insights for understanding the wired world and the algorithmic upheavals to come.