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Performing Anonymity: Investors, Brokers, and the Malleability of Material Identity Information in Financial Markets

The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adaptation: Anthropological Explorations

ISBN: 978-1-78635-228-6, eISBN: 978-1-78635-227-9

Publication date: 1 September 2016

Abstract

Purpose

Although markets are intensely social, stock markets are peculiar in that they are normatively anonymous spaces. Anonymity is a difficult-to-achieve social accomplishment in which material identity information is successfully stripped from participants. The academic literature is conflicted regarding the degree to which equity markets are anonymous and how this influences traders’ behavior.

Methodology/approach

Based on focused, tape-recorded ethnographic interviews, this chapter investigates the work practices of professional investors and brokers to describe the conditions under which brokers veil or reveal investors’ identities to their competitors, and thereby shed light on how anonymity is socially produced (or eroded) in global stock markets.

Findings

The social structure of brokered financial markets places brokers in the awkward situation of sitting in an information-poor structural location for so-called “fundamental information” while being paid to share information with professional investors who sit in an information-rich structural location. A resolution to this material and social dilemma is that brokers can erode the market’s anonymity by gifting identity information (“order flow”) – the previous, prospective, or pending trades of their clients’ competitors – thereby providing traders a competitive advantage. They share identity information in three types of performances: transparent relationships, masked relationships, and the transformation of illicit material identity information into licit and sharable “fundamental” information. Each performance partly erodes transaction-level and market-level anonymity while simultaneously partially supporting anonymity.

Practical implications

Laws and regulations requiring brokers’ confidentiality of their clients’ trades are easily and systematically eluded. Policy makers and regulators may opt to respond by increasing surveillance and mechanization of brokers’ work so as to promote a normatively anonymous market. Alternatively, they may opt to question the value of promoting and policing anonymity in financial markets by revising insider trading regulations.

Originality/value

Even well-regulated markets are semi-anonymous spaces due to the systematic exposure of investors’ identities to competitors by their shared brokers on a daily basis. This finding provides an additional explanation for how professional investors can imitate one another (“herd”) as well as why subpopulations of investors often trade so similarly to one another.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

This chapter would not have been possible without the generosity of time from my interviewees. Thanks also to my undergraduate research assistants, Mourad Bouajaja, Jason Carter, Ellie Wickes and Charlee Zingraf. It has also benefited from critical feedback at the 2008 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Boston, particularly by Joon Nak Choi, Jan Simon, Yuval Millo and Klaus Weber, by a lengthy gestation, and from superb feedback from Corrin Pitluck and two anonymous reviewers. Amber Thomas created Fig. 1. All errors of argument and interpretation are my own.

Funding: This work’s original fieldwork was supported by a Fulbright (IIE) Research Grant and an Illinois State University Faculty Excellence Initiative Grant. This research was partially sponsored by Budapesti Közép-Európai Egyetem Alapítvány (CEU BPF). The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Central European University Budapest Foundation.

Citation

Pitluck, A.Z. (2016), "Performing Anonymity: Investors, Brokers, and the Malleability of Material Identity Information in Financial Markets", The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adaptation: Anthropological Explorations (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 36), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 223-251. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120160000036009

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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