Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London

by Caitlin Zaloom

From New York to Singapore, from Chicago to London, the trading floors of the world’s financial markets are icons of global capitalism. Images of them are used on the news all the time—traders burying their heads in their hands when the market is down, their arms flailing in a frenzy when fortunes are rising—to convey the current state of the economy. But these marketplaces, and the cultural life that sustains them, are dissolving into the ether of the digital powerful financial institutions are shutting down the trading pits, replacing face-to-face exchanges with an electronic network where traders sit, face to screen, finger to mouse, and compete in a global arena made up of digits and charts. 

Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers to the market as a whole. Caitlin Zaloom takes us down to the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade and into a digital dealing room in the City of London. Drawing on her own firsthand experiences as a clerk and a trader and on her unusual access to these key sites of global finance, she explainshow changes at the world’s leading financial exchanges have transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation; how people and places are responding to the digital transition; how traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace; and how brokers, business managers, and software designers are collaborating to build new financial markets. 

A penetrating and richly detailed account of how cities, culture, and technology shape everyday life in the new global economy, Out of the Pits will be must reading for business buffs or anyone who has ever wondered how financial markets work.

Genres: Anthropology

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Andy Nguyen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book because I thought, being both a trader and an anthropologist, Zaloom will have a lot to say on the topic of traders that are not already covered by untrained ex-traders or highfalutin academics. I was wrong. Zaloom's description is not sharp, refreshing, or original - it is full of stereotypical stock characters and scenes that we can come up with ourselves just by hearing the world "traders". And being a trader herself, her description is oddly detached and lacking in authenticity and sincerity. Her explanation and interpretation of traders' behaviors are also a let-down: there were moments of brilliance, but those moments were brief, and buried in a meandering river of gobbledygook.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good ethnograpgy and i find her work on "emboding practice" is good but like most of Rabinow's students she moves from Foucault and Weber forgetting Marx and the fact that both theorists (Foucault and Weber) have Marx as a taken for granted NOT as something to forget. ... there is a lack of class in this narritive.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I envy Caitlyn Zaloom. She started an ethnographic study of commodity futures traders at the Chicago Board of Trade right before the Board switched from open-outcry to electronic trading. It's hard to imagine a better ethnography of contemporary capitalism. It's a little dense if you're not used to reading anthropology but not so dense that 20-year-olds can't get something out of it.