ABSTRACT

Understanding and anticipating market movements plays a critical role in current capitalist activity. Through the assessment of the present and the engagement in the unknowable future, financial-market participants create financial opportunities. At the heart of this process is the work of experts who claim to provide ‘thorough analyses’ of economic trends and market movements. In this article, I illustrate how analysts – a powerful guild of economic experts – capitalise on ‘feeling’, individualised strategies and storytelling to come up with explanatory narratives about possible future market scenarios. In doing so, I build upon the notion of speculation as a practice that is grounded in imagination and show that narrativization of such futured-oriented images is a vital – yet often neglected – process: it allows to treat the unknowable as if it was anticipatable, uncertainty as if it was calculable risk, and thus speculation as if it was ‘investment’.

摘要

了解和预测市场走势在当前的资本主义活动中起着至关重要的作用。通过对现在的评估和对未知未来的参与，金融市场参与者创造了金融机会。这一过程的核心是专家的工作，他们声称对经济趋势和市场动向提供“全面分析”。在本文中，我将说明分析师——一个强大的经济专家公会——如何利用“感觉”、个性化策略和讲故事来提出关于未来可能的市场情景的解释性叙述。在这样做的过程中，我将投机的概念作为一种基于想象的实践，并表明这种面向未来的图像的叙述是一个至关重要的——但经常被忽视的——过程：