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Technology in financial networks 207Each of these sources has a complex relationship to the space and time ofthe market. Traders read the bid and offer numbers within the confines of adealing room filled with the screens and bodies of other traders. The talkbetween traders also happens within the dealing room. There, traders canstation themselves to engage with the will of the market. However, the marketitself, as I have noted, is presented as a supra-spatial entity. The third elementof information gathering derives more from understanding the market as atemporal entity. The CQG screen displays a number of charting techniquesthat traders can choose from. Many used a technique derived from BollingerBands, a framing device that predicts the movement of the market. The linesfollow a moving average that provides definitions of high and low prices forfutures contracts. The trader can than see where the price on the screen departsfrom this indicator and buy or sell accordingly. The bands illuminate how aprice has moved out of alignment at any given moment. This helps the traderfix the market in time.Many economists agree that the step-by-step movement of the market isunpredictable, a random walk that renders short-term fluctuations impossibleto anticipate. 15 Although traders who make money from the fast-pacedchanges of market direction would disagree with this theory, they concur thatgleaning coherent information from and orientation to the market is a criticaland complex process.AN ENGINEERED SOCIAL FIELDThe spatial and temporal conditions of the electronic market favor a certainkind of trader. Each market technology creates an environment that establishesthe set of skills that will be most effective and yield the most profits. The tradingpit favored the well connected. Traders who can take best advantage of theelectronic field are masters of speed and prescience. The informational andsocial conditions forged in electronic markets assume that the profitable traderwill be the fastest to see where the market is headed and the most able to reactquickly. Electronic networks condition the competitive field to give advantageto traders who seem to operate as isolated individuals. The a/c/e is an anonymoussystem. Anonymity is not a property of the technology. It is rather achoice of representation – a market without the appearance of individualactors.The CBOT’s first electronic trading system, Project A, operated on thesocial principals of the pit. The screen created an image of a marketplace filledwith individual traders. The Project A screen displayed a three-letter identifierfor each trader participating in the market. In the pits, traders wear badgesimprinted with these codes pinned to a lapel. Traders sometimes use these