Book description
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 her unusual access to key sites of global finance, she explains how changes at the…
Why read it?
1 author picked Out of the Pits as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Chicago’s famous ‘open-outcry’ trading pits were packed with hundreds of traders making deals with each other using eye contact and hand signals, or simply shouting out their bids and offers. Anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom did something quite extraordinary. She studied these pits ‘from the inside’ (as a trader’s clerk) and then went on to examine the electronic trading that was starting to replace them – herself becoming a trader. Her book represents anthropology at its most skilled and offers a fascinating glimpse of the lost world of face-to-face trading (nearly all of Chicago’s pits are now closed).
I researched Chicago’s pits…
From Donald's list on financial trading and the global financial system.
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