Cables versus email: we are in the future

In Nicolas Darvas’s 1960 memoir How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market, the author details his complicated efforts as he traveled around the world on a dance tour to keep informed about daily changes in stock prices via cables from his broker and mailed editions of Barron’s that usually reached him four days after their weekly publication dates. Today, we take for granted the conveniences of email and the Internet, which can zap timely information to us almost the nanosecond it is available, to almost anywhere with infrastructure on the planet. We can’t teleport ourselves but we can teleport all updates and analyses. This seems mundane to us. We regard as intolerable any inescapable if fleeting glitches in the miraculous conveyances, which incarnate in sped-up and digitized form the channeled ingenuity and coordinations of market processes as such, and streamline those processes.

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