Noise

"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"
"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"