Two decades ago, Daniel Beunza, a professor at London’s Cass Business School, embarked on some ethnographic — or fly-on-the-wall — research into that modern financial jungle, the Wall Street derivatives trading floor.

“I had read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and imagined the trading rooms of Wall Street to be overcrowded and dominated by emotion and, as Wolfe wrote, full of ‘young men?.?.?.?sweating early in the morning and shouting’,” Beunza notes in his 2019 book Taking The Floor.

But when he arrived at the designated Wall Street skyscraper, eager to study stress and social drama, Beunza was disappointed: the bank floor was deathly quiet, without any shouting into phones, since market trading had recently migrated on to electronic screens. He almost cancelled his study.