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

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 age: 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.

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and assistant 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.