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Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets QUOTES

Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets QUOTES

1 " Like most visionary utopias, though. IDN (Integrated Data Network) was never to be. Perhaps it was simply too ambitious a project: infrastructures seldom respond to a single vision or a master plan, as Paul Edwards (2010) writes, and conjuring up a platform that would serve the entire marketplace was an almost Quixotic task. Infrastructures emerge not through planning and calculated foresight, but through the meandering paths of history, in the mangle of making, tinkering, and wrestling with the obduracy of organizations, practices, and their installed base. The system eventually introduced for Big Bang reflected this fragility and contingency of infrastructures: it was the creative result of reshaping legacy devices into a system that did the job for the time being. A band-aid. A product of creative, recombinant bricolage. "

― , Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets

2 " The road to EPIC was not frictionless, however, and required constant symbolic investments in the capacity of the 'technocrats' and their inventions. As Mitford-Slate noted in interview, technologists had to pass numerous hurdles, in addition to the technical difficulties of building systems that not available off the shelf, they 'had to sell [their ideas] to me and I had to sell them to a lot of people who didn't understand technology whatsoever. "

― , Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets

3 " A somewhat provocative example of the interconnections between the gaming industry and finance. A technologist working for a large London hedge fund hinted this to me in interview. Trained in computer science and engineering, this interviewee first worked as a network programmer for large online multiplayer games. His greatest challenge was the fact that the Internet is not instantaneous: when a player sends a command to execute in action, it takes time for the signal to reach the computer server and interact with the commands of other players. For the game to be realistic, such delays have to be taken into account when rendering reality on the screen. The challenge for the network programmer is to make these asymmetries as invisible as possible so that the game seem 'equitable to everyone.' The problem is similar in finance, where the physical distance from the stock exchange's matching engines matters tremendously, requiring a similar solution to the problem of latency: simulating the most likely state of the order book on the firm's computers in order to estimate the most advantageous strategies or the firm's trading algorithms. Gaming and finance are linked not through an institutional imperative of culture or capital - or even a strategy, as such - but rather through the more mundane and lowly problems of how to fairly manage latency and connectivity. "

― , Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets