The Consequences of the Symbolic and Technological Virtualization of the Financial Market

In a first step, we present what we call the " symbolic virtualization " that illustrates the " consumer-oriented " dimension of finance where recent marketing methods present the financial market as a " fashion game ". We also emphasize the speculative impacts of this evolution. We introduce then what we call the " technological virtualization " of finance, that derives from the growing computerization of finance mainly characterized by the automatic trading and the e-finance.The third part of the paper show that this double virtualization in finance allows us to consider the financial market as a " hyper-market ". We use this term to emphasize the " consumer-oriented " dimension of finance and to present the financial market as a result of the hyper-reality described by Baudrillard. In the last section, we show that this hyper-reality allows a plurality of theoretical interpretations of the financial reality. That is why the fragmentation of knowledge that we can currently observe in financial economics can be considered as the epistemological consequence of the hyper-reality in finance.