In the popular imagination, fed by movies like Arbitrage and the lionization of hedge fund titans, the stock market is often associated with great wealth and glamour. In reality, most of the folks trying to make a living from the market lead far less alluring lives.
The Beat, a project from the Rutgers Social Media Information Lab mashes up geolocated and hashtagged Instagram photos with the Google Street View locations where they were shot. Here’s a representative sample of the homes from which Instagrammers who tag images ‘#stocks’ do their thing. It seems that the overlap between early adopters of mobile imaging apps and market-driven wealth is not so great… or maybe these folks are just frugal:
