Christian Borch is Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Politics of Crowds (2012) and Social Avalanche (2020), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning (2025).

"Borch's interviews and observations root the book firmly in the everyday life of algorithmic finance. What he writes is always sober, clear and well-informed; there is no directly competing work. This is, in short, scholarship of the highest order. An important, influential book." —Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh"The book is a first in offering a comprehensive, empirical analysis of the rapid internal development of automated trading in trading firms from an economic sociology perspective. Theorists will love the book too for its deep cutting questions about the central notion of agency and actorhood in social science. The book is written in a pleasantly narrative style, an enormous plus when the subject matter is technical and as cut off from public view and scientific understanding as in ML." —Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago

• 1. Two Tales of the City2. Human Action at a Distance: First-Generation Automated Trading Systems3. Creating Trading Automatons: The Rise of Second-Generation Systems4. Risk, Reliability, Regulation5. Explaining Automatons' Action and Interaction6. Automatons Unbound: Implications for Sociology and BeyondAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Studying Financiers in the Era of Automation and Machine LearningNotesReferencesIndex

Christian Borch is Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Politics of Crowds (2012) and Social Avalanche (2020), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Machine Learning (2025).

"Borch's interviews and observations root the book firmly in the everyday life of algorithmic finance. What he writes is always sober, clear and well-informed; there is no directly competing work. This is, in short, scholarship of the highest order. An important, influential book." —Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh"The book is a first in offering a comprehensive, empirical analysis of the rapid internal development of automated trading in trading firms from an economic sociology perspective. Theorists will love the book too for its deep cutting questions about the central notion of agency and actorhood in social science. The book is written in a pleasantly narrative style, an enormous plus when the subject matter is technical and as cut off from public view and scientific understanding as in ML." —Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago

• 1. Two Tales of the City2. Human Action at a Distance: First-Generation Automated Trading Systems3. Creating Trading Automatons: The Rise of Second-Generation Systems4. Risk, Reliability, Regulation5. Explaining Automatons' Action and Interaction6. Automatons Unbound: Implications for Sociology and BeyondAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Studying Financiers in the Era of Automation and Machine LearningNotesReferencesIndex