Online Financial Markets: An Ethnographic Study of Independent Day-Traders in Israel

Erez is a forty-seven year old, divorced taxi driver who trades various types of derivatives from home in online, global financial markets. He started day-trading four years ago, after completing a thirty-hour course in one of the many financial trading schools that have opened up in Israel in the past decade. His house is small, and the computer he uses for trading is positioned in the living room, next to the TV. He testifies that he has spent endless hours in front of this computer, learning the charts, perfecting his expertise at analyzing them. His dream is “to make money from money” in these online markets, bank his profits and live off the interest. In his four years of daytrading he has lost more than he has gained, but he believes that the losses were educational and that he learned from them many necessary lessons about himself and about the market-crowds whose behavior he tries to foresee. By now, he says, he has almost mastered online trading. When his thirteen year old son is home, he often asks questions about the colorful charts on the screen, and Erez feels that it is an important part of his fatherly duty to teach him what they're all about.