Trading Beyond Understanding: Machine Learning, Risk, and Markets

By Christian Borch

Machine learning is fundamentally transforming financial markets. Where trading strategies were once crafted by human experts-executed manually or through pre-coded rules-firms now build models that generate the strategies themselves. These are not just tools but trading automatons: semi-independent systems designed to learn from markets and act on their own. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in financial markets, Christian Borch offers a rare inside look at how these systems are built, the risks they pose, and how they challenge our understanding of markets and decision-making. As trading automatons grow more complex and opaque-even to their designers-new sociological questions emerge: What happens when machines become the primary agents in markets? And how should we understand economic action when human judgment is no longer at the center? Trading Beyond Understanding is a powerful investigation of machine agency, market transformation, and the shifting boundaries between technological systems and social life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1503636801
• ISBN13: 9781503636804
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"