Whoosh Goes the Market: Algorithms, Automation, and Alienation

A vivid, fast-paced inside look at financial markets, the people who work on them, and how technology is changing their world (and ours).

Markets are messy, and no one knows this better than traders who work tirelessly to predict what they will do next. In Whoosh Goes the Market, Daniel Scott Souleles takes us into the day-to-day experiences of a team at a large trading firm, revealing what it’s actually like to make and lose money on contemporary capital markets.

The traders Souleles shadows have mostly moved out of the pits and now work with automated, glitch-prone computer systems. They remember the days of trading manually, and they are suspicious of algorithmically driven machine-learning systems. Openly musing about their own potential extinction, they spend their time expressing fear and frustration in profanity-laced language. With Souleles as our guide, we learn about everything from betting strategies to inflated valuations, trading swings, and market manipulation. This crash course in contemporary finance vividly reveals the existential anxiety at the evolving front lines of American capitalism.

Daniel Scott Souleles is an anthropologist who is associate professor in the Department of Business Humanities and Law at the Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality and a coeditor of People before Markets: An Alternative Casebook.