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Paper short abstract:

Online and mobile trading apps bring global financial markets into people’s personal devices. App users learn to read and imagine the world through the portfolios they carry in their pockets. Working with users in Singapore, I consider how this arrangement modifies what money does.

Paper long abstract:

With the rise and popularization of online and mobile stock trading applications, global financial markets are now carried around in people’s laptops, handbags and pockets. How do these new configurations of distant and proximate wealth, electronic and physical assets, and macro- and microeconomic concerns change the way that people imagine and interact with their worlds?

This paper draws on ongoing fieldwork with stock trading app users in Singapore, to explore how these technologies are remaking people’s conceptions of value, personhood and obligation. Specifically, I ask how the mediating role of money is being modified. If money is classically theorized as the great agent of abstraction that renders qualitatively incommensurable goods commensurable and brings everything and everyone into “the market,” how does the emergent practice of on-the-go retail investing compel us to rethink the way that money connects, commodifies and alienates? What novel notions and forms of relatedness, fairness and responsibility does money in this instance engender and enforce?

Preliminary findings suggest that stock trading app users in Singapore regularly enact the idea that the significance of events in the world “out there” is their impact on the the stocks in their pocket. Trading apps provide the framework through which users read the news and envision the lives of others. Money in this framework becomes something that objectifies other people, while intensifying one’s relationship to oneself. I expand on this finding and explore its implications for the question of how new market technologies are changing what money does.