bucket-shop
Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- noun (noun) A stock broking firm which takes small orders from clients and takes them on its own account rather than actually transmitting them to the market. Prevalent in the US 1870s to 1920s; often set up as shop-fronts in the 1920s.
Examples
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The loose policies of the 1920s Federal Reserve spurred a borrowing wave and promoted a new financial elite, described with pitiless precision by Brooks: white-mustached Jack Morgan and his 'brains,' Tom Lamont; the German-Jewish power brokers of Kuhn Loeb; and the infamous bucket-shop operator Jesse Livermore, known as The Boy Plunger.
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The grandfather dallied too often with the 'bucket-shop' before he forgave his foolish child, and when he came to his better paternal self, he hadn't much to leave his little granddaughter.
Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
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'A bucket-shop, my son,' said the father, feelingly, 'a bucket-shop is a modern cooperage establishment to which a man takes a barrel and brings back the bung-hole.'
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Wall-street's bucket shops are becoming aggresive. They have a new scheme, and are gloating in an anticipatory way over the sensation which they will create in the Stock Exchange district when all the beauties of this new scheme are disclosed.
'Bucket shop sharpness,' The New York Times, November 3, 1887
Note
The term 'bucket shop' originally referred to saloons that sold small amounts of liquor in buckets. Also 'bucket-shop.'
