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Why would you buy an electric car on Jetski Friday? Or, a critique of financial markets from an options trading room

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Daniel Souleles
Daniel Souleles*
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
*
Corresponding author: Daniel Souleles, CopenhagenBusiness School, Porcelænshaven 18A, 2.132, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

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This article presents a close, dialogue-based ethnographic account of a group of contemporary options market makers making a decision about pricing options in Tesla, Inc. Careful attention to their deliberations reveals how the rise of algorithms and automation on financial markets have rendered traders alienated and estranged from the markets they work on for their livelihood. This alienation arises, in part, due to novel cascade effects between futures and underlying equities, which algorithmic and automated trading seems to afford, and which also relate to news events as well as the actions of politicians and prominent business people. Emerging from this alienation, traders produce a critique of how highly automated financial markets allocate capital and how ripe they are for political manipulation.

Keywords

Financemarketsalienationoptionstrading
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , 2021 , pp. 113 - 129
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2021 The Author(s)

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