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Technology in financial networks 199dealing room of a London proprietary firm (LDF). I worked as a clerk at theCBOT for six months in 1998. I arrived at the exchange each morning at 6.45a.m. to prepare for the day as a runner and a clerk, placing orders on paper anddelivering them with hand signals to brokers inside the pits during tradinghours. I learned to read the space and time of the market, as most CBOTtraders do, by working within them.My apprenticeship continued in London’s electronic markets. I arranged tojoin LDF as a new recruit among ten new traders. Each morning before sunrisein the fall and winter of 2000, I arrived by tube in the heart of the City,London’s financial district. Trading began at 7.00 a.m. and I arrived at my deskat 6.30 a.m., early enough for a cup of tea and to gather information about theovernight markets. I traded German treasury bond futures on an LDF account,spending nine hours a day in front of the trading screen working to glean profitsfrom the differences in volatility between 10, 5 and 2-year German bondfutures. To supplement my work and observations in these arenas of exchange,I interviewed officials at the exchanges and technology companies andattended meetings on the reorganization of the industry.THE PITFor the past 150 years, the CBOT has drawn participants and informationtogether into the trading pit. The central location for trading, information gathering,and price discovery I call a “nexus market.” The trading pit is the materialtechnology that supports the nexus. Within the pit, the social network oftraders gives definition to the whirl of speculation. The architecture of the pitdefines the space where the relationships of obligation and reciprocitybetween traders are put to work and where information about financialcommodities are evaluated and solidified into a price. 6The pit is a technology originally designed to configure traders in space andtime. As the work of William Cronon (1991) has shown, the greatest achievementof the CBOT was the production of a centralized market in grain futures,which, at the time, utterly changed the grain trade and set the model formarkets that later changed the face of global finance. The markets in grainfutures that this organization developed were (and still are) run as auctions.The CBOT futures auctions produce prices for grain and bond futures, a singleprice for each commodity that fluctuates as information about the productchanges the outlook for supply and demand. 7An auction is most efficient and effective when all those who want to buyand sell a product can see and hear the bids and offers of all the other participants.By the late nineteenth century, trading at the CBOT had become sopopular and the trading area so crowded that the speculators could not see all