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

In Out of the Pits, Caitlin Zaloom shows how traders, brokers, and global financial markets have adapted to the digital age. Drawing on her firsthand experiences as a clerk and a trader, as well as on her unusual access to key sites of global finance, she explains how 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 markets. A penetrating and richly detailed account of how cities, culture, and technology shape everyday life in the global economy, Out of the Pits will be required reading for anyone who has ever wondered how financial markets work.

“Zaloom’s superb book is a double-site ethnography [that shows how] the appearance of chaos hid a complex social order, which Zaloom delineates beautifully.”—The London Review of Books

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her research on traders and technology has been featured in the New York Times and on the BBC.