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Noise: Living and Trading in Electronic Finance (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

Noise: Living and Trading in Electronic Finance (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

by Alex Preda (Author)

  • New

    Illustrated 2017

    $37.40
Synopsis

We often think of finance as a glamorous world, a place where investment bankers amass huge profits in gleaming downtown skyscrapers. There's another side to finance, though the millions of amateurs who log on to their computers every day to make their own trades. The shocking truth, however, is that less than 2% of these amateur traders make a consistent profit. Why, then, do they do it? In Noise, Alex Preda explores the world of the people who trade even when by all measures they would be better off not trading. Based on firsthand observations, interviews with traders and brokers, and on international direct trading experience, Preda's fascinating ethnography investigates how ordinary people take up financial trading, how they form communities of their own behind their computer screens, and how electronic finance encourages them to trade more and more frequently. Along the way, Preda finds the answer to the paradox of amateur trading the traders aren't so much seeking monetary rewards in the financial markets, rather the trading itself helps them to fulfill their own personal goals and aspirations.

$37.40

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 280
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 01 Mar 2017
ISBN 10: 022642748X
ISBN 13: 9780226427485

Media Reviews
With keen insight and elegant style, Preda takes us into a memorable exploration of twenty-first century electronic finance. Challenging stereotypes of atomistic financial markets, Noise captures with fascinating ethnographic detail the connected social world of traders. A welcome contribution to the sociology of economic life, the book will also engage a general audience eager to understand how finance really works. --Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy
In Noise, Alex Preda immerses himself in the world of retail traders, amateur investors who seem to be the ultimate lone wolves, seeking money from the comfort of their homes, but who are nevertheless intimately connected with each other and with the professional trading world. . .Preda shows that the worlds of professional and retail trading are not as distant from each other as others have made it out to be. --Public Books
Preda's Noise is a most rare volume. In elegant writing, Preda is able to explain the complexity of electronic trading, revealing that what has often been described as random perturbations, enacted by ignorant traders, is, in fact, highly organized, intensely social, and fully cultural. What might be described as mere noise, seemingly unintelligible, is integral to how markets operate, and, in Preda's telling, markets could not operate efficiently without such seeming inefficiency. This book is truly eye-opening in its willingness to overturn the assumptions of a rationalist market fundamentalism. It is a most important contribution to economic sociology and the understanding of finance. --Gary Alan Fine, author of Players and Pawns: How Chess Builds Community and Culture
Author Bio
Alex Preda is professor at King's College London. He is the author of Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance.