Bucketing

A shady sales tactic that, if successful, could make you the Wolf of Wall Street...but you will more likely see your career resemble the final minutes of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma.

Grandma needed to raise some money quickly to pay for her Twinkie habit. To raise the money, she called her ex-boyfriend, Winston Wolfe, suggesting he invest in a stock currently trading at $1.25 per share. He agreed to buy 100 shares and Grandma told him the trade was confirmed. But she actually waited for the stock to dip to $1.05 per share before buying the shares for Winston, and pocketed the extra $20.

While Grandma got lucky on this trade. Had the stock gone up to $2.50, she would have owed $125 she didn’t have...and would have had to escape over the river and through the woods, in search of a safe hiding spot.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is a Bucket Shop?15 Views

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Finance, a la shmoop. What is a bucket shop? Anyone see wolf of Wallstreet?

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Remember Leo's firm yeah that was a bucket shop, it was set up to fraud, [Bucket shop stamp]

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deceive, steal, and basically take advantage of trusting naive rubes

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who gave Leo and his partners their money and well they basically did vile [Toilets]

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things with it. Bucket shop is a derogatory term coined [Leo holding money toilet paper]

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by the Supreme Court actually in a 1905 ruling, in practice bucket shops were

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often unregistered financial pool halls where quote investors unquote would bet [Pool tables]

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on short term stock moves and well never actually take delivery of a

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security. They would just like make the bed and then whatever happened they'd [Men in suits]

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settle in cash outside of the security system, think of the bucket shop as a

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first derivative of a real brokerage, such that cash comes in and goes out

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without a whole lot of logic behind it, it's like betting on what tickers gonna [Stock tickers]

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come up next on CNBC at the bottom of the screen you know that thing. Yeah so [Stock ticker appears under the CNBC logo]

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that's what that weird logic is or lack of it other than as a reflection of

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whether or not Ford ticker F went up a dime or not that day, like that's what [Ford stock price chart]

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bucket shops do you're just making bets on random things and yeah Ford the wolf [Chips being placed on a roulette table]

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of Wall Street's second favorite F word, fine film though should see it... [The wolf of wall street being played in a theatre]

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)