Introduction: the ethnography of noise in electronic finance -- Noise in financial markets -- How does one become a trader? -- Taking on the market: competitions and spectacle in trading -- Rituals and illusions of the trading screen -- Talk in trading, talk for trading, talk of trading: group...

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,...