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

by Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

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.

Genres: Finance

370 pages, Hardcover

Published June 27, 2019

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finance is a canary in the coal mine of contemporary capitalism.

Meaningful work to be done on the practical and theoretical frontier for a new type of 'market design' that places less emphasis on seemingly technical questions of engineering and efficiency and more on public, deliberative discussions of how markets should be constrained, altered, expanded, and retooled to serve our collective, kindred interests.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Such an annoying academic style! first 15 pages of the book the author tells what the book is going to tell. When reading these chapters I was asking “Cut the crap. Stop watering down the book. Just start the story”. Basically you have to skip paragraphs and paragraphs of text just to find the place where author starts getting to the point.