Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 13, Number 2, pp. 369-400
Industrial and Corporate Change 13/2 © ICC Association 2004; all rights reserved.
Tools of the trade: the socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street trading room
Correspondence: David Stark, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: dcs36{at}columbia.edu
Abstract
To analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative finance we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and momentum investing, we argue, arbitrage involves an art of association—the construction of comparability across different assets. In place of essential or relational characteristics, the peculiar valuation that takes place in arbitrage is based on an operation that makes something the measure of something else—associating securities to each other. The process of recognizing opportunities and the practices of making novel associations are shaped by the specific socio-spatial and socio-technical configurations of the trading room. Calculation is distributed across persons and instruments as the trading room organizes interaction among diverse principles of valuation.
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