We often think of finance as a glamorous world, a place where investment bankers amass huge profits in gleaming downtown skyscrapers. There's another side to finance, though--the millions of amateurs who log on to their computers every day to make their own trades. The shocking truth, however, is that less than 2% of these amateur traders make a consistent profit. Why, then, do they do it?

In Noise, Alex Preda explores the world of the people who trade even when by all measures they would be better off not trading. Based on firsthand observations, interviews with traders...