Wire Transfer

Categories: Banking, Tech

See: Wirehouse. See: Wire Room.

Need to send some money to Mexico, or maybe Russia? (We won’t ask why.) Sending it via mail is risky, and sending it via a courier is also risky (and expensive). If only you lived in the same country, or had the same bank.

Fortunately, there's an answer. Moving ca$h electronically across the global bank network, i.e. a wire transfer. It’s safe, secure, and fast (especially if you’re used to America’s ACH system, which is sloooowwwww compared to the internal banking systems of most other countries).

Why is it a "wire" versus some other name? Well, when transferring money among banks was high tech (think: 1922), data traveled more or less in the vein of Morse Code across copper wires with all kinds of security codes behind them, trying to make the transfers safe. It worked, more or less, and became a Thing. Today, data travels through air and/or via fiber optics. So...maybe we should rename it a "glass transfer"?

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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)