ABSTRACT
This chapter applies an analysis of affects to results from fieldwork on companies working in algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading (HFT), also known as automated trading. Affect analysis captures the multi-dimensional nature of human–machine relations, and delineates the specificity and singularity of the HFT environment. Affect analysis also makes it clear that in algorithmic finance, in contrast to earlier forms of manual and screen-based trading, processes of automation multiply and intensify complex multi-frequential bonds – material, electrical, visual, acoustic, cognitive, and bodily – between humans and machines. This is somewhat counterintuitive, because it means that automation in fact intensifies complex human–machine relations. Moreover, it is the intensity of these affective relations that underpins the coherence of HFT socio-technical systems. Thus, a difference in degrees of intensity becomes a difference in kind, consequently automated trading systems can be described as a type of socio-technical symbiosis.
