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the personal relationships of the pit that mediate between individuals and themarket. In electronic networks, the majority of competitors lie beyond theboundaries of any individual’s dealing room. Electronic technologies separatetraders from their strategies built on watching the actions of others. Distancedfrom their competitors, traders can also no longer draw on the “feel” of themarket. The noise and collective excitement that traders used to index thestrength or weakness of the market are unavailable. Second, the trading screencreates a new representation of the market. Replacing face-to-face with faceto-screeninteraction allows seemingly direct access to the market. Traders nolonger apprehend the market through the voices and bodies of their competitors.The screen presents the market as an object to be read: a digital marketmade material in bid and offer numbers.Like the original pit design, electronic markets also face the challenge ofunifying a fragmented market. Trading screens accomplish this by creating anintegrated representation of the market. The design of the a/c/e, the formalname for the CBOT/ Eurex platform, represents the market as a single entity.It appears as a series of changing bids and offers on the screen. There are noidentifications of individual traders. The screen is completely anonymous.Each individual strategy is masked. There is no indication of how manyfutures contracts any one trader is bidding for or offering to the market. Thereis only an aggregate number of bids and offers. These numbers confront thetrader as a unified opinion of supply and demand. Rather than displaying themarket as a collection of individual assessments of economic information, thea/c/e screen presents the market as a coherent force with which the individualtrader contends. He is not in direct engagement with other competitors, butrather he is attempting to glean profit as an individual against the mass. Thisrepresentational centrality focuses the traders on the supra-spatial entity of themarket rather than on their competitors in locations around the globe. Thephysical representation of the market on the screen now mirrors a particularvision of the market: the market as a singular unit, rather than as a collectionof individual players. Each trader now confronts the market as an individualagainst the unitary will of the market – an object without a place.Time in Electronic MarketsTechnology in financial networks 205Creating an efficient, liquid electronic market in futures requires drawing inparticipants from around the globe. Electronic markets reshape temporalconditions that effect the participation of traders. Traders in certain marketsdominate trade in CBOT products and the work-hours in their time zones arethe most active in the market. For dealing rooms far from Chicago andFrankfurt, managers must find traders who are willing to work hours that beginlate and extend into the early hours of the morning. These night owls can take