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Investing on a metaphor : Small investors meet the growing Brazilian stock market

This working paper addresses one of the main issues that have emerged from our undergoing research on the small investors in the growing Brazilian stock market, that is, the widespread usage of metaphors through which investors refer to the stock market as a “game”...

...Within this paper, based on the analysis of the twelve qualitative interviews with small investors carried out for the research, I argue that investors tend to evoke the game metaphors to talk about the market in three situations: A. when they are explaining “what kind” of money they invest on stocks, B. when they justify the kind of trades they don't like doing and C. whenever they argue that the stock market is ruled by a special logic that demands a special analysis and/or rationale. By exploring these three situations through the analysis of the interviews, I argue that the translation of an economic arena into the language of games can be understood as a cognitive operation similar to the one performed by Totemism, that is, similar to the way Totemism mobilized the specific language of the “natural world” to think about the “social world”, structuring and making the latter intelligible, according to the famous work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on Totemism.

Key -words: Stock markets; Economic sociology, Lévy-Strauss.

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Eduardo Vilar Bonaldi

Maestrando em Sociologia

Universidade de São Paulo

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Investing on a metaphor:

Small investors meet the growing Brazilian stock market

 

Introduction

When I first started my research on small investors in the Brazilian stock market, I could never suppose I'd be somehow addressed to the sophisticated argumentation of Lévi-Strauss on Totemism. But it happened. This opportunity of writing a working paper for RITA - the kind of text in which the researcher iscalled forward to show the “hot scene” of a research that is under construction, that is, to expose frankly the strategies, doubts and uncertainties of an incomplete work – seemed to me as a unique chance for developing this unpredictable association. Readers should feel free for assessing to which extent such association is adequate or not.

Before getting to the main points of the paper, I must provide a short overview of my research, initiated last year. I study the universe of non-professionalized investors, that is, “common people who hold investments in the Brazilian stock market, without conducting professional activities within the institutions of the market (i.e. banks, brokers), nor having any specialized education on the world of investment or finance, such as a MBA in finance, for instance. The investigation aims at comprehending the social and cultural factors that affect the way these investors take their decisions, focusing on the correlations between social identities defined on the basis of gender, age or family status (being married or not, having kids or not) and the patterns of risk adopted in the market(1), as well as on the social representations of the money that should be separated for investment on stocks and of the stock market itself and on the symbolic classifications of companies and economic branches that are “good” (or “bad”), “worth of trusting” (or not) for stock investing(2).

I proceed through a set of twelve qualitative interviews with small investors, each two of them representing a different category - defined upon age, gender and family status – of the financial education courses offered for free by the stock market of São Paulo (BMFBOVESPA)(3), as one of its  policies for enlarging the participation of small investors in the Brazilian market(4).  Each investor is interviewed twice within a period of one year, to account for eventual changes in his modus operandi on different moments and scenarios of the market.

 

I. Getting convinced by the power of a metaphor

          In Le Totémisme aujourd'hui, Lévi-Strauss (1962a) argues that Totemism takes over the language and the set of relations through which the natural world is perceived and makes use of them to structure the reflection about the social world and the process of clan identities construction. This mental operation inscribed in the forms of Totemism apprehends and takes advantage of the vocabulary and relations that makes nature intelligible to develop and organize the comprehension of the social space, elaborating and perceiving a similitude between the differences observed within each of these two diverse worlds.

Therefore, as Lévi-Strauss strongly insists, Totemism doesn't confuse nature and society, it doesn't take one for the other, being unable to distinguish them as two diverse realities. Differently from that, it is considered to act as an intellectual bricoleur(5), which takes the vocabulary and relations of nature as a basis for organizing a certain point of view and a logic of classification regarding the social world. The bricolage of the savage thought is not naive to assume a relation of metonymy between nature and society, actually it evokes society in the terms of nature, establishing, in this sense, a relation of metaphor between them.

When the first investors I managed to interview started to say “bet on a stock” rather than “invest on a stock”, “step into the game” instead of “entering the market”, I didn't pay much attention to that. I thought it was just a way of saying things, and a way typical to beginners, since my first two interviews were with investors who had little longer than a year of experience on stock picking.

Nevertheless, as I kept on going with the interviews, I noticed that more experienced and sophisticated investors insisted on “translating” the market according to the language of games. Investors who took their investment decision trough the use of rather complex analytical tools that assess graphics and/or the financial data of companies naturally assured me that the market was like a game. Those who had a twenty, or even a forty-year experience on investing, one of them who is even a famous writer of manuals on stock and options investments in Brazil, didn't loose a chance to reinforce the metaphor of games. While transcribing and analyzing the interviews(6), I could notice that in the interview on which it took the longest time for a 'game-reference' to appear, this time was no longer than eight minutes (the duration of interviews ranged from 50 minutes to one hour and a half), that is, talking about the stock market for less than ten minutes was enough to get associations to the cultural universe of games from all the interviewees.

Along with the interviews, I got in contact with the sociological literature on stock markets, which showed me that the association of games and stock markets was no novelty at all. Mitchel Abolafia (2001) demonstrates, in his ethnography about professional traders on Wall Street, that these traders frequently compare themselves to high-performance athletes, or even war-aircraft pilots. The results and performance on the trading floor involve, according to Abolafia, besides the obvious financial dimension, a hard dispute around  the social status and prestige hierarchy of being a “winner” within this professional group. A higher position along this status hierarchy offer prizes such as: proud, self-confidence for aggressive investing, symbolic acknowledgment and respect by the others and, as one inspired by Pierre Bourdieu could say, the possibility of converting this specific symbolic capital on economic capital, trough richer job and salary offers.

Abolafia also mentions the relevance traders attribute to the 'instinct of trading, a property that is definitely not the same as intelligence or formal education, something that can be acquired only trough the rough day-by-day experience on the trading floor, that allows traders to take decisions really fast, based on intuition and impressions, decisions whose rational motives, most of the times, can't be retraced: traders generally say they take these decisions only because “it feels like the  right thing to do”.

This instinct is acknowledged as the distinct trait that separates “losers” and well-succeeded traders, those who survive, and those who can't. Due to the hard competition, to the non-monetary prizes under dispute and to the emotional intensity experienced on the market, Abolafia compares financial markets to what Clifford Geertz meant by a “deep play”, in his famous study on the Balinese cockfight (1975).

Jean-Pierre Hassoun (2005), in an ethnography about French traders, has similar findings to   those of Abolafia. He stresses the fundamental importance of emotions for the decisions and performances on the trading floor, revealing how the market is faced by professionals as a multi-typed game. Following the classification of the study of Caillois (1958) on the universe of games, Hassoun argues that the market can be seen as, at the same time, a “betting game”, because under some circumstances  it depends on luck, as an agonistic game , because it develops a harsh competition among egos, a “game of uncertainty”, because results are always undetermined depending on the interplay of different strategies adopted by investors and, finally, as an “inebriation game”, due to the intensity of emotions experienced by its players.

That being so, interviewees and the sociological literature convinced me of the power of this metaphor, that relates the stock market to the cultural universe of games. After undergoing this kind of “conversion”, I decided to analyze my qualitative data to determine on which contexts of the interviews investors feel the need of expressing their views and behavior in the market on the terms of a game, that is, I attempted to distinguish the different topics investors were commenting, the different points they were trying to make, whenever they turned to the universe of games to talk about stocks. The results of this analytical approach are displayed in the next section of this paper.



II. Three topics that stir up game metaphors

On which contexts of the interviews do investors feel the need of expressing the market on the basis of a game? What kind of games are they evoking when they do so? And how does it affect their concrete behavior as investors? These are the questions I will try to answer here. By analyzing the record and the transcription of the interviews, I have distinguished three topics from which references to the universe of games arise: a. when investors explain what kind of money they invest on stocks, b. when they explain the kind of trades they don't like doing and c. whenever they argue that the stock market is ruled by a special logic that demands a special analysis and/or rationale.

A. What kind of money I invest on stocks.

Viviana Zelizer (1989) has gathered lots of empirical evidence about the fact that people do not comprehend money as a neutral or homogeneous substance. On the contrary, people tend to separate, categorize and establish diverse symbolic meanings for money along with different social situations, that is, social relations frequently institutionalize controls and distinctions in the sources, uses, allocation and quantity of money: modern society marks and shapes money as it is shaped by money as well(7).

Investors also define the money they separate for stocks in a very precise manner and whenever they do so, they tend to evoke the market in the terms of a game, more precisely, in the terms of a “betting game”. Let them speak for themselves:

“The money I have on stocks is different from the money I have for getting by, for keeping my house, my car, my kid. I won't leave this money on stocks, because I don't know what will happen with this market tomorrow. The money I keep there is the money I don't need for living. If I loose it, that's OK, I mean, I'll be pieced off but.... Bt that money can also grow to something huge! You know, to sum it up, it's just like a roulette, like a casino, but they give it another name!”

If the market is comparable to a “roulette”, to a “casino”, you can't invest the money you 'need for living' on it. This kind of definition can be thought as a legitimation strategy, for the own individual as well as for others, of his condition of investor, that is, the interviewee admits that the market is risky and uncertain, such as gambling is, but he avoids moral accusations that can be risen against people who like gambling by stressing out that the money he invests, if lost, won't cause financial jeopardy for his 'house', 'car' or for his 'kid': neither his family or social status are endangered by his trading habits.

Restricting the investments to small amounts of money is frequently advisable according to the interviewees, another one of them stated right after the downturn of October 2008: “It's still possible to build a nice portfolio of stocks, but with big money, I would not recommend it.... You've got to go little by little, always with small money, money you won't need very soon”. Despite of the lack of references to game in this statement, the recommendation of going “little by little” and the opposition between “big money” and “small money” demonstrate the same feeling of respect for the market, for its risks and uncertainties, that is evidenced by the game metaphor.

Another trait generally present at the definition of the 'money for stocks' as a special money is the fact that interviewees do not easily allocate money separated for other purposes to make their capital grow. When explaining how he deals with his money on stocks, we find another usual reference to games in the words of another investor:

“The thing with this money [money on stocks] works like this: I have an amount there [on stocks], when I make profits - ' oh, That's wonderful!' - the profits join the original amount and then I go betting again. But when I loose some, I won't refund it. If, one day, this money disappears, I won't get happy, that's for sure, but it won't cause trouble to my life at all.”

Again, there's the distinction, now implicit, between the money “for stocks” and the money “for living” and the association between investing and “betting games”. When the interviewee says that if the money on stocks eventually disappears, it won't cause any trouble to his life, once more it's hard not to take it as a legitimation strategy, for himself and for others, included here the own researcher, who, presenting himself as a student of sociology, is likely to be identified, by the interviewee, as someone far from the world of the stock market(8).

Reinforcing the risks and special restrictions that concerns the money for stocks, the same investor felt the need of explaining that he and her wife, who also works, have a mutual banking account for the house expenses, but, on the other hand, he keeps an amount of money for my things and she does the same for her thingsto avoid arguments over spending preferences. And one of his “things” was the stock investment, he states: “So, my wife's money is not there. I do what I do only with my own money(9)”.

These definitions of the money for stocks, generally justified by references to “betting games”, are really something typical to, say, “light” investors, that is, people who allocate only a small part of their income and savings on the market. When I asked them what were the goals for the money invested, they generally said that the money on stocks could be used, in the future, for luxurious spending, such as traveling, for instance. Some of them have been investing on stocks for a long time (one of the investors quoted has been investing for 15 years), they tend to say that they like the market and to present it as “kind of a hobby”, but they do not claim to be sophisticated investors, that is, they generally say they don't have time or even interest to learn more sophisticated techniques of market analysis(10). So, this kind of investor tend to comprehend the market as something close to a “betting game” - his performance depending, to some extent, on being lucky or not - and to legitimate their participation on it by restricting and separating the money invested on stocks from the money “for living”.

That doesn't mean that associating the market to the universe of games is something we commonly find only when it comes to these investors. Actually, my point is that this specific kind of association between games and market is more common to the kind of investors we've just described, while more active and sophisticated investors will compare the market to games within other frameworks, as I intend to demonstrate on the following topics.

B. Things I don't do in the market

Sometimes the game metaphor arises when interviewees are explaining what kind of trades they prefer not to undertake. Again, as we will see, the game they are referring to is one of a betting kind. Nevertheless, this time, they do not mean to associate the whole stock market to a game that is eminently risky and uncertain, depending intensely on luck or on the lack of it. On the contrary, this time, they are arguing that only some practices and specific groups of stocks are comparable to a betting game, implicitly opposing them to other practices and stocks which are more susceptible to a systematic analysis and risk-controlled behaviors.

If the comparison to a “betting game”, followed by the well-defined and distinguished nature of the money separated for stocks, triggered, as I tried to argue, a self-legitimation strategy of investors against possible moral doubts that could be risen against them, this time, the comparisons  aim at legitimating specific modes of operation and trading styles in the market – that is, the ones the interviewees adopt and are trying to justify -  trough the implicit stigmatization of other modes and styles. The stigmatized practices and groups of stocks are associated to the cultural universe of games, in an attempt to portray these practices and stocks through the negative moral status evoked by this universe.

One investor was explaining that 'his business' was only trading the blue chips, which are the stocks from the largest companies, with the highest liquidity in the market and acknowledged to be safer choices of investment. He argued that blue chips carry less risk than less liquid stocks from small or not so huge companies, that are known, respectively, as small and middle caps. But while talking about these other two groups of stocks he didn't make any reference to games. It only happened after he mentioned a book he has read about plans and strategies to get rich that taught  the basic conceptions about trading options(11), that was the moment he said:

“I know a bit of options, well, the basic stuff about them. But I never wanted to trade them, to enter this thing, because, you see, options are just like betting! People trade with more money than they actually have. They can win twice, three times what they have, or they can end up loosing everything. They say the money can “turn into dust” when you are in the options thing.”

Another investor made a similar point, in order to complete his explanation on the reasons why he prefers to hold his stocks for some days, about the day-trading practice(12). Explaining that he neither liked to hold his stocks for longer than a month nor to day-trade, he states regarding the last:

“Day-trading is for people who have time to stay glued to the PC screen. But even if I had this time, I think I wouldn't do it. People say there are special strategies and tools for day-trading, but I 'm not convinced, I guess that, at the end, it looks more like gambling.”

I don't do it, because “it looks more like gambling”. Well, here a question can emerge: do these last investors also evoke the market as it was showed in the previous topic? Yes, the investor that rejects day-trading is the same that recommends that, when it comes to money for stocks, one should always go “little by little”, not with big but with “small money”. Isn't it a controversy? No, I wouldn't say so. In my point of view, investors are making use of the game metaphor mainly for reflecting about the stock market, for making it intelligible according to references and comparisons taken from another cultural universe of meaning, one which is more popular and closer to them. In this sense, the game metaphors can emerge at different contexts and can be evoked with different purposes by the same interviewee. It's true that the way the metaphor is evoked in the first of our topics is typical to “light” investors, as we argued, and the way it's going to be evoked in the third topic is more common to come from more sophisticated investors, but that can’t lead us to think that a “double occurrence” of the game metaphors is not possible or is a sign of controversy or confusion.

To conclude this topic, let's analyze a case in which the game metaphor evidences an investor that, consciously, trades by two different logics, depending on the kind of stock he is dealing with. This investor is a recently retired man who has made use of his stock trades to complete his monthly income, without trades, according to him, it would be impossible to pay the bills of his wife and three kids. After telling me that most of his trades and invested money is concentrated on short trades with blue chips, he adds:

On the other hand, I always keep a foot on the trash (laughing) By trash, I mean companies that are into heavy debts, that don't pay dividends, that are almost ruined, the trash. Why? Because these companies have very devalued stocks that can suddenly, by speculation or some good news, double, or triple. But this is pure gambling, you see, nothing can happen as well, and your money can simply disappear. So I go on those with small amounts.”

While the short trades with blue chips are decided through a careful analysis of price graphs and the aid of software analytical tools, because these trades “pay the bills of the house”, the trades with the “trash are longer (he says he can hold one of these stocks up to three months), with smaller amounts of money (following our analysis in the previous topic) and the criteria for deciding and trading is not as sophisticated and careful as the trades to pay for the house expenses. Actually, as he explains afterwards, the criteria for “trash picking” is “simply choosing which stocks have devalued the most but have a recent record of some recovery”, that's why, he refers to this criteria as “pure gambling”, opposed to his techniques and methods of graph analysis. To sum it up, this investor makes use of the game metaphor to illustrate his conscious altering between two different logics of trading, depending on the diverse nature of stocks involved.

C. A certain game, a special market

More sophisticated investors also talk about the market on the basis of a game. By more sophisticated investors I mean the ones whose decision-making processes involves the usage, to a large extent, of the analytical tools provided by software, updated in real time with the data from the stock market, designed to support investment choices. There are two approaches to stock analysis: the fundamental analysis and the graphical or technical analysis. Basically, the first consists on the analysis of the balance sheet of a company, its financial data conjugated to the way the market values its stocks, while the second simply makes no reference nor to financial nor to economic data about the companies, it focuses only the mathematical tools and equations to analyze their graphs of price and trading volume of their stocks.

The more sophisticated investors generally evoke the game metaphor in a different way. The game they’re referring to is not one of a betting kind, as we saw in the previous topic. It's more likely to be a “strategical game”, demanding the internalization of a specific logic or rationale, which is distinct from the logic that rules other markets. The specific logic of this game would not rest upon either a strictly objective analysis of the financial conditions of a company or a correct apprehension of concrete economic trends. Actually, winning this game would be about being able to anticipate the other market agents expectations and behavior regarding the financial health of companies or the economic trends of the moment. It wouldn't really matter if these agents are right or wrong: what is at stake is anticipating their possible actions, deducing the future movements of the market for knowing where to get profits from and be a “winner” in this game.

A very experienced investor who is a well known writer – within the universe of Brazilian small investors - of books that teach people the concepts and strategies of the graphical analysis, started the interview(13) like this:

“Well, to start, I can say I don't think fundamental analysis is useful for this game. Nowadays, I really see the market as a game. [...] I believe the stock prices don't have anything to do with the fundamentals of companies. If I were a businessman who is going to buy a company, I would surely have to know about the value of the assets of such a company, how much they are worth, because that would be the business I would have to run. But here [the stock market], it's not about that! Some investors have this illusion that, when they buy a stock from company A, they are under the fate of company A, but the market doesn't respond to that like this, it doesn't work like this.”

So he went on, arguing that stocks frequently oscillate independently from objective conditions, led by a complex shock of multiple appreciations by market agents, concluding that: “ To make money, you have to identify the best moments to enter [buy a stock] and to leave [to sell it], and, for that, you only need the graph.”

The game of anticipating future behavior surely involves uncertainties. The graphs emerge in the discourse of investors – at least the ones who adhere to the technical analysis – as valuable “weapons” one has in order to deal with uncertainties. But, despite the trust inspired by graphs, they are not seeing as an omniscient and infallible oracle. The interviewee who always “keeps a foot on the trash” but plans systematically his other trades, quoted in the previous topic, says:

“I usually joke saying that the stock market is for psychologists, rather than for economists, because it overreacts for the good and for the bad. So, the graphs are the weapons you have for analyzing the movements of this thing. Graphs are good, but one can't say they are an exact science, that's for sure!”

Coming back to the previous interview we had analyzed, the interviewee goes on with his game metaphor, reinforcing the unavoidable problem of uncertainties and highlighting its competitive trait:

“It all comes down to probabilities. In the market, unfortunately, there's no such a thing as the absolutely right or safe. Better saying, not unfortunately because, otherwise, everybody would win and then the game wouldn't be possible. The game can't be a place where everyone wins. It has to be few people winning from lots of people to make sense.”

As we can see, this way of evoking the game metaphor seems to be very popular among investors who practice the graphical analysis. Nevertheless, an engineer we interviewed and who practices the fundamental analysis, opposing himself strongly to the graphical analysis, talks about a particular logic of the stocks that is distinct from the expected economic rationality that a “naive” adherence to the analysis of fundamentals would suggest. A particular logic that is actually very similar to the logic illustrated by the game metaphor.

“I don't believe in graphical analysis. At the end, what it says is that the future will be a repetition of the past. Future repeating the past? Who can assure such a thing? [...] So I try to go for stocks that have good balance sheets, that have strong fundamentals and some liquidity. But this is not enough. If the fundamentals are good, but the market doesn't recognize it, doesn't see it, what's the point? So, I pay attention not only to the fundamentals of a stock, but also to the opinion that the market has about this stock. If its price is raising, it's a sign that the fundamentals are being recognized by the market.”

Fundamentals are not enough, the opinion of the market surely matters, and the prices of stocks are the changing reality that makes it possible to read the opinion of the market. Therefore, despite the dissonance between defenders of the graphical analysis and the ones of the fundamental analysis, what we see here is the perception and formulation of a particular logic that rules the dynamic of stocks, very similar to the one that was illustrated by the game metaphor we described in this topic.


Conclusion: Totemism and stocks?

The totemic species may not be good for eating, but they are surely good for thinking. Lévi-Strauss' famous analysis showed the intellectual bricolage of Totemism as a mental operation according to which the vocabulary and the relations that make nature intelligible are mobilized to structure the reflection and the modes of classification within the social space. Levi-Strauss insistently evidences, therefore, that Totemism does not take society for nature; it is not naive for confusing both of them, for taking them as the same thing, it simply establishes a relation of metaphor between these two worlds, and not one of metonymy.

I do not have any desire or ambition to state that investors do exactly the same when they represent the stock market on the basis of a game. But recalling the analysis of Lévi-Strauss has somehow helped me to think about game references investors presented in their discourses as a relation of metaphor, between the market and the cultural universe of games, similar to the one established by Totemism, between nature and society, according to the analysis of Lévi-Strauss. The purpose of this paper was just to share the effects of this unpredictable association, part of a research which is still under construction.

Being that a metaphor, my hypothesis is that the references to games are a way of understanding and translating the stock market into a more accessible and popular cultural universe of meanings, that is, the game metaphor is an intellectual resource investors use to make this market intelligible. But the special thing about intellectual resources is that they, as I tried to argue, influence, shape and generate concrete practices, for it is obvious that if a market is completely strange and unintelligible for an individual, he will not be able to take decisions and to act within this market. Totemism and stocks are surely far from being the same, but they are both still cultural, social, intellectual, I mean, human experiences. 


Notes de bas de page

(1) Here I try to do something similar to what Brooke Harrington (2008) has done with identities of investment clubs and their stock choices.

(2) Moreover, I also investigate how  'financial education' initiatives ( such as books and courses that teach people to invest) may influence these investors, as well as the “performativity” of softwares designed as a support for the decision-taking process of non-professionalized investors , following here the ideas of Callon ( 1998)
(3) So, I interview two investors that correspond to each one of the six categories of financial education courses, offered by BMFBOVESPA. There is a course designed only for women, one only for retirees, one for families and so on.

(4) From 2002 to 2007, the Brazilian stock market grew 465%. A year after the sharp downfall of global markets in October 2008, the Brazilian market has already come back to the levels sustained before the crisis. Along with that performance, the number of small investor grew from 85.000 to 521.000 individuals, from 2002 to 2009. These individuals are currently responsible for 29% of the total financial amount negotiated in the market.

(5) The concept of intellectual bricolage is presented by Lévi-Strauss in his book The Savage Thought (1962b).

(6) So far, I've made, transcribed and analyzed the first cycle of the twelve qualitative interviews I've planned. Besides, I have also interviewed two professionals of the financial education area.

[7] Zelizer makes her point examining the changing cultural meanings and social conventions regarding the married women's money in the United States, from 1870 to 1930.

(8) Taking the lessons of the famous American sociologist Erving Goffman to their limits, one cannot forget that sociological interviews are, themselves, a “social encounter” with all the implications Goffman withdraws from it.

(9) I also asked if his wife had ever felt attracted by stocks. But, unfortunately, for exploring the gender dimension of stock investment the limits of this paper would not suffice.

(10) At the beginning of interviews, these investor generally warned me that they didn't know that much about stocks, other played jokes that evidenced lack of self-confidence, like “are you really sure you wanna know how I invest?”.

(11) Options are, roughly saying, contracts that compromise one with a future buying or selling of certain stocks, within the values and conditions stipulated by the option contract. It is generally said to be a more 'abstract' and risky activity than the regular trading of stocks. 

(12) The day-trade is the practice of buying and selling a stock within the same day in order to a get small valuation percentages. Day-traders generally perform a significant number of trades, adding up these small valuations. It is known to be a very speculative, or even addictive, practice in the market.

(13)
He simply took the initiative to start the “interview”, made the first move through a discourse of 15 minutes on his personal view about the market, without being asked any question by me. I didn't object to it because, as we can see, that discourse was very useful for my analytical purposes.



Références bibliographiques

Abolafia, M. (2001). Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Cailloix, R.( 1958). Man, play and games. New York: Free Press.

Geertz, C. (1975). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Harrington, B. (2008). Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and The New Investment Populism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hassoun, J. P.  (2005). “Emotions on the trading floor: social and symbolic expressions”. In Knorr-Cettina, K and Preda, A. (org.) The sociology of financial markets. New York, Oxford Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962a). Le Totémisme aujourd'hui. Paris: P.U.F.

Lévi-Strauss, C.
(1962b). La Pensée Sauvage. Paris: Plon.

Zelizer, V. (1989) “The Social Meaning of Money: "Special Monies"”.
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 95, n°2: 342-377.

 

Pour citer cet article :

Vilar Bonaldi Eduardo, «Investing on a metaphor: Small investors meet the growing Brazilian stock market», RITA, N°3 : Avril 2010, (en ligne), Mise en ligne le 6 avril 2010. Disponible en ligne http://www.revue-rita.com/notes-de-recherche-champlibre-36/investing-on-a-metaphor-champlibre-146.html