Wall Street Speak: Idioms and Adages

There are many phrases, adages, and idioms commonly heard in Wall Street speak. Cassidy Clement, Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Interactive Brokers is joined by Chief Strategist, Steve Sosnick to discuss financial market sayings. The two break down their meanings and origins.

Related Links:

Financial Jargon: Origins and Meanings – https://ibkrcampus.com/podcasts/cents-of-security/financial-jargon-origins-and-meanings/

Summary – Cents of Security Ep. 19

The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.

Cassidy Clement

Welcome back to Cents of Security podcast. I’m Cassidy Clement, senior manager of SEO and content at Interactive Brokers. Today, I’m your host for our podcast. Our guest is Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. We’re going to discuss financial market sayings, these phrases, adages, and idioms are commonly heard in Wall Street. We’re going to break them down with their meanings and their origins. So, welcome back to the program.

Steve Sosnick

Hi Cassidy, great to be here.

Cassidy Clement

So, we had a podcast recently where we talked about jargon and really common words that you will see in financial news and financial commentary and we kind of dug deeper into where they came from and why they have stood the test of time. But with that we talked a little bit about like wait a second, there’s a lot of adages that we could have explored that we didn’t go into that people are going to see all over and in whatever publication or videos they watch. So, to kind of just give this a little bit of a unique spin for your understanding what adage had the most impact on you throughout your career so far?

Steve Sosnick

Dress British, think Yiddish, talk sports.

Cassidy Clement

Wow, OK, break that one down. That’s a good one.

Steve Sosnick

That was given to me by my first boss at Solomon Brothers and that was really the motto of that firm and it was just sort of, it’s a silly saying, but that was, you know, how the mentality, they were a very aggressive trading house in the 1980s. They sort of were a little bit outside of the mainstream of what we would call ‘white shoe’ Wall Street and so, much more scrappy mentality. That was the way to navigate the world when I started out in my career. [It] doesn’t really apply to life here at Interactive Brokers at all. But it did in the early part of my career.

Cassidy Clement

Some other popular phrases, some investors maybe would be aware of or maybe say, oh, I’ve seen that a few times. I’ve heard that a few times just in a daily newsfeed or watching a financial news program. Probably we should start with the category of saving versus spending. So, the tight grip on somebody’s purse strings, that one, it sounds pretty obvious like people are holding, holding the purse strings pretty tight, but this one you hear it in a lot of explanations I guess you could say for certain things, but penny wise and pound foolish. So, if you were to explain that one?

Steve Sosnick

Yeah, I kind of enjoyed the financial etymology of this whole exercise. It’s kind of fun. The Pennywise, pound foolish; You know it obviously dates back to England, because you had pounds and pence or pennies, which is where the term came from. But what it means is sometimes it’s not always smart to watch your pennies if you’re losing sight of the big picture. There are times when you, when maybe someone is being a little unnecessarily cheap. So, for example, right now, one that applies very strongly to our firm is a lot of people find it very popular to to trade commission free, which you know obviously seems to save you the pennies on commissions. On the other hand, what we found is our customers have mostly opted for the the IBKR Pro account where they pay a small commission, but they find that over time they save more money in good executions. Well, that’s sort of an example of making the choice to be penny wise or to be pound foolish? Are you saving a few cents here and there, but it’s costing you more money in the long run?

Cassidy Clement

So, that kind of goes into the phrase of sometimes people say cheap is actually expensive, where when you’re counting the pennies and you’re not looking at that bigger picture, you’re focusing on these real tiny details, you start to lose hold of what actually is going to occur or looking at the risks of a broader….

Steve Sosnick

Clearly, there are a lot of opportunities that people miss, they may think that this small outlay or relatively small outlay can lead to some problems or just not be worth it. But you really should look at the big picture and decide whether you’re being cheap or whether you’re being thrifty. They can be two very different things.

Cassidy Clement

That kind of shows the difference of one polarization in a way like somebody who’s looking at, as you said, just looking at the little things and then somebody who’s looking at the broader picture. But another common phrase is bet the farm which you’re going to hear a lot, probably with people who are all in, we’ll say on something. But if you were to explain that one to people who are new to the space, how exactly could you explain that one?

Steve Sosnick

That’s a good one, because I don’t really know where the phrase came from. I assume it has to do with probably the early days of commodity trading. You know, where  people would you know, trade Commodity Futures on leverage. That was typically done by people with some sort of agricultural interest, whether they are farmers or consumers. What it means basically is, well you uses the term all in, it’s to basically put all your marbles in one place or put all your chips on the table. All in is the modern equivalent. Bet the farm is sort of the the quaint old school version of it.

Cassidy Clement

So, people betting the farm as if the farm was the collateral.

Steve Sosnick

A lot of times it was the collateral. A lot of times, you know, basically think about like, an agrarian economy. The farm was what you owned. You know, you either owned the land or you had the right to to farm on that land. And your assets were your crops or your livestock.

Cassidy Clement

That’s what I was just going to say. The firm was the asset. That’s what you were holding. With the topics of buying and selling in these phrases and adages, another common one is ride the wave. We probably are really familiar with that because of social media as of late. There’s a lot of waves and trends, and headlines. But you know, I can easily say riding the wave is definitely following that wave of a trend. Am I right?

Steve Sosnick

Well, I mean, ride the wave. I’ve only ever really heard as applied to Skittles. Truthfully. Sorry, but that doesn’t have a long history in financial markets. The better way that I would phrase that is the trend is your friend. And that really means that markets do tend to follow trends. I’ve had this discussion with many people. There’s a there’s a podcast that we did about a year and a half ago, Thomas Peterffy and I. You know where we talked about? It’s much easier to be a trend follower than to spot trend changes. It’s very difficult to do and anytime you hear people talk about momentum trading strategies, trend following strategies, that’s typically what they’re doing. They’re finding that you know some stock or commodity or other financial asset seems to be moving generally in one direction, there’s tools for helping you spot that, like moving averages and things of that nature. So, that is probably the simplest, more or less, trading strategy, but it can be an investment strategy as well.

Cassidy Clement

It’s kind of like explaining the phrase with another phrase. So, riding the wave is kind of going with the flow of trends and thus the trend is your friend. So, that way you can go with the flow of where the market’s going, or at least what you perceive it to be doing, yes.

Steve Sosnick

Thank you for translating into younger lingo.

Cassidy Clement

So, these next two, the first one is you know anybody who watched Wolf of Wall Street or insert financial movie here that everyone quotes in Business School, buy low, sell high. That’s like the first thing you learn. The second thing you learn. Buy the dip.

Steve Sosnick

Buy low, sell high. I mean that is investing right? That’s your whole point is to buy something at a low price and then sell it someday at a higher price, you know, on the other hand, if you’re a short seller, you want to sell high and buy low. So, you want to do the reverse. But that’s investing in a nutshell is to find something that is trading at a price that is likely to go up. Buy the dip is something that traders have done since the beginning of time, but I think it’s become a little too reflexive and I’ll argue a little too popular. Now. Things that dip don’t always recover, and I think that’s a that’s a big thing that’s lost. So, it can be very difficult. It’s sort of the opposite of the trend is your friend. What you’re trying to do is find some situation where some stock has fallen and you’re going to say this is an attractive buying opportunity. Well, what you’re doing there is you’re not following the trend. You’re saying there that this thing seems to have broken it’s uptrend, it’s got some sort of setback and you’re implicitly betting that this setback is temporary. Well, they’re not always temporary. To throw in a couple of other ones like that is dead cats don’t bounce, because a lot of times people say, ‘oh see, it’s sold out. It’s a dead cat bounce’, and it bounces a little bit, but they don’t always come back. We fell into that trap and a lot of newer investors really felt that buy the dip was a foolproof strategy because to be fair for the better part of two years it was, pretty much from March of 2020 through the end of 2021 or early 2022. Things that went down came back. But the reasons for that were fairly unique. We had the Federal Reserve cutting rates dramatically, throwing money into the system. And also you had the fiscal authorities throwing tons of money into the system. So, there was always fresh money to come in there and buy, and the markets were rising dramatically. So, almost every dip could be bought. Well, guess what? In 2022 the markets went down. Not every dip should have been bought. And so, it’s one that needs to be done with care. It’s an art or skill that, probably some of each, deciding when to buy the dip because literally you’re doing the opposite of trend following; you’re basically saying this stock, whatever this is, it’s a pothole, not a fork in the road.

Cassidy Clement

I think you made a a good point there, which is buy the dip is not a foolproof proof strategy. It’s something that needs to be done with care because the idea is that hopefully you as the investor are finding something that is relatively underrated and supposed to be something bigger or recover from that dip and start to go back up, but not always does that happen, as you said.

Steve Sosnick

No. So, you have to be very careful and not do it reflexively. You better have a reason to do so.

Cassidy Clement

Oh boy, the other one that may need more care. Buy the rumor, sell the news.

Steve Sosnick

That one is actually not as tricky believe it or not. What it means is the efficient market hypothesis says that markets contain all the information that’s available to them and use that information to price whatever financial asset efficiently. In reality, that kind of works in the long term. It doesn’t necessarily work in the short term. So, what happens a lot of times is you hear that some company is going to be announcing some new product, let’s say the new iPhone for example, and everybody knows the new iPhone is going to be great and you hear all the rumors about the new features and what it’s going to encompass and everything else. Well, then the day the iPhone is released, then what?  Everybody’s been buying in advance of this news release. Well, if everybody’s been buying in advance of the of the anticipation, who’s left to buy it after the after the news comes out, unless there’s something new and dramatic. So, if everybody’s expecting a bigger screen and more megapixels in the camera et cetera, et cetera. And it’s actually released and that’s what it is, and the demand for it is what everybody expected, well, where’s your catalyst? The stock has presumably been going up because everybody’s been buying based on all this other stuff. Well, now it’s here. Who’s the next buyer?

Cassidy Clement

So, the expectation influences the value, but the news is the actual fact.

Steve Sosnick

But the expectation gets priced in ahead of the news, so that’s another one of those features, a lot of times if the hype exceeds the actual news. So, you actually see the reverse happen. You know you see this thing overshoot and you know, OK, the next NVDA chip is going to be this fabulous, wonderful chip and it turns out, well, maybe it’s not as wonderful as everybody thought it was going to be. Well, that, even though it’s going to be wonderful, and I’m picking on NVDA. I picked that company just sort of randomly, but that’s the sort of mentality and the same thing happens in reverse, by the way for for negative news. A lot of times people dread something is going to happen. It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be bad. Well, either it comes out and it’s no worse than everybody already expected, or it’s actually less bad than anyone expected. And so, you actually see the stock rally on bad news. So, there are situations where you get the movement in advance. One of the best, going back years ago, I remember one of the bigger trades I’ve ever made was, Windows 98 was coming out and Microsoft everybody was talking about Windows 98. I remember going to the beach and everybody. You know what? Maybe it was Windows 95. So, I’m dating myself as being older than the people listening to the podcast. But basically, and I remember going to the beach and everybody’s talking about this, I’m like, ‘You know what? I got to sell this!’, and what happened was it was released whichever it was, 95/98, which windows it was. But it was fine. There was nothing wrong with it, but everybody it was, it was what everybody thought it was going to be. But the problem was everybody had been buying up in anticipation that it was going to be the the greatest thing since sliced bread, and whichever one it was, it was actually pretty. It was good. But the hype had gotten so crazy that when it actually came out, there was no one left. You know, there was no one left to buy.

Cassidy Clement

Interesting. So, it hyped itself up enough.

Steve Sosnick

Or, well, the market did the hyping for them. But that’s the concept behind it. But this applies in life, right? Like you hear about some movie that’s going to be fabulous. It’s, you know, it’s going to be terrific. Although everybody’s buzzing about it and it comes out and it’s. All right, that was good.

Cassidy Clement

Similar to the expectation gave it, most of the potential. It’s like when you go see a movie and all the good parts were in the trailer, you already understood it. Everybody got all the jokes, the quotable lines, and what the movie’s about. And they don’t even have to go see it.

Steve Sosnick

Yeah. Or the flip side is you go to some movie that you know, you couldn’t get into what you wanted to see, but you’re already committed to going to the movies. So, you’ll go see this other one. You haven’t heard much about it and all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘oh, that was good!’.

Cassidy Clement

Pleasant surprise, yeah.

Steve Sosnick

So that’s really the psychological component behind buy the rumor, sell the news.

Cassidy Clement

The other side of selling, though, sell in May and go away. I used to do the content admin for some of your pieces, so I remember hearing this all the time. Is it just like spring cleaning of stocks? What exactly does that mean?

Steve Sosnick

Actually, there is a seasonality to the market, and it is verifiable and it’s tough to get the timing exactly right. But for the most part, markets do tend to go up, call it the November to May period. And they tend to move sideways to down in the May through October-ish period. It’s far from foolproof. When you start to deal with seasonality, nothing is etched in stone. These are historical patterns, but there are academic studies that show if you’ve been invested, and I forget the exact dates, but call it November 1st to May 1st and then put your money in cash from whatever the other time period is, you would actually be better off than if you just stayed invested 100% of the time. But again this year you had a great summer. So, anytime somebody tells you one of these historical seasonality things, there is actually some statistical evidence that it works, I think more than some statistical evidence but, the problem is just because something works overtime doesn’t mean it works in any given year.

Cassidy Clement

So, that actually that exact point was something that we covered in a recent podcast about technical analysis, where it’s like you can have all this amazing data, but you have to remember the specifics of your circumstance and your situation because there’s a chance that you could just do all of this without a care in the world and just go off of the phrase and then you realize ‘Oh, that didn’t fit my circumstance. That doesn’t apply to what I invest in or how I invest’, because it’s just one of those adages that has been used for years and years and years.

Steve Sosnick

This is statistics and probability and yes, it works much of the time and sometimes to be right it doesn’t even have work the majority of the time. It just has to work better some of the time to justify it, so it’s a useful adage. It’s one to keep in the back of your mind. It’s not without some evidence behind it, but that doesn’t mean it always works. I mean, over the past 12 months, let’s say, you know, the market bottomed out let’s say mid-October of 2022. Had you ridden that into May of 2023, you’ve done great,  you would have missed out a bit of the rally that happened this summer. But as of now, as we’re taping this late September, kind of given back most of that movement since May, so not necessarily wrong.

Cassidy Clement

Interesting. So that one you can do your own research on, but standard response in the sense of it doesn’t apply to everybody. Always do your research.

Steve Sosnick

When anything involving seasonality, and if you want to know another adage, I just wrote about this recently, which was sell Rosh Hashanah, buy Yom Kippur. It’s a weird seasonal adage. Obviously, it’s much more popular in the Northeast than other places, but it again involves seasonality because markets tend to be rocky in mid to late September into October. The problem is that those holidays are moving targets. But this year it actually worked phenomenally. You know, you avoided probably a 4-5% loss if you’d sold. And also again it’s something we’ve written about was September tends to be the worst month for the market. August tends to be the second worst month for the market. We can go into the rationale. I think it has a lot to do with locking in profits. Portfolio managers want to lock in their profits. Traders want to lock in their year, so they can get good bonuses.

Cassidy Clement

I was just going to say you’re starting to get towards the end of the year.

Steve Sosnick

You know, in the movie Trading Places, you know, I like to use, there’s a line where Eddie Murphy says, ‘I could smell people get nervous. They want to buy their kid, the GI Joe with Kung Fu grip, and they can’t’. That’s the mentality, the seasonality. But because it’s rooted in something but it doesn’t, doesn’t mean it works at every season. Anything that’s a pattern, as you say with technical analysis, it may work much of the time. It doesn’t work all the time.

Cassidy Clement

Yeah, nothing is completely always solid. If it was foolproof, somebody would have done.

Steve Sosnick

If it was foolproof, everybody would be doing it, then it would no longer be foolproof because everybody was doing it.

Cassidy Clement

Right, exactly. With that seasonality point and you were saying there were different parts, that’s, let’s say that were a little bit more saturated with activity than the others. Is the phrase waiting for the pull back kind of like that you’re waiting for the clamor to calm down?

Steve Sosnick

Buy the rumor, sell the news problem. Yeah, I mean that, that, that sort of goes again back into trends, if you look even at a trend, they don’t move in straight lines, they’re jagged. And so, if you’re sort of doing a little bit of trend following, you know, sometimes stocks run ahead of themselves, they get this enthusiasm. You know, everybody jumps in and you sort of get a bit ahead of yourself, and then it pulls back and so you can still be trend following. But you know the trend is more of a band than a line. And so, you wait for it to pull back a bit. You know a lot of times when things get truly crazy that the trend goes from linear to parabolic and that’s very that’s very dangerous. The problem is you can chase that parabola, but somebody is going to get left holding the bag and that’s one of the times you may want to wait for the pullback.

Cassidy Clement

I’m going to bring up two quotes kind of with what you just said because I know you’ve mentioned these two quotes several times in some of your articles. The first one goes with somebody’s left holding the bag, which is when the tides go out, you see who’s swimming naked, which I believe is Warren Buffett, so.

Steve Sosnick

That is Warren Buffet.

Cassidy Clement

So, I’ll tell you what my thoughts are on this quote and you can kind of I guess add some market color to it, but it’s kind of like the tough times happen, you’re going to see who covered themselves, who was in over their head, who actually is going to take the loss and make any gain, if possible, right?

Steve Sosnick

Yep. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m supposed to answer it with more than one more answer!

Cassidy Clement

But you can, but I’ll take that as a point for me, thank you.

Steve Sosnick

No, you got it. What it means is it’s very easy to make money when markets are going up, when the tide is coming in. You know I reference the example of how buy the dip was relatively foolproof for about a year and a half to two year period. But then in 2022, when the markets pulled back, you saw who was, the problem is that people who are just reflexively, they just continuing to pyramid their bets. It didn’t work for them. And so, you could see that a lot of those strategies didn’t work. A lot of people unfortunately lost money. And so that’s I use the analogy with tides all the time referring to the monetary, you know the the the Feds right now the tide is going out. Out in terms of interest rates, or at least it’s, it may not continue to go out.

Cassidy Clement

What you mean by that is pulling money out.

Steve Sosnick

But it’s staying out. The Fed is pulling money out, they’re raising rates and guess what? In March, we found out that a lot of banks were not prepared for rate hikes. So, there was an actual banking crisis. Those were the people who were skinny dipping. As the tide went out and that’s where the analogy comes from.

Cassidy Clement

I guess the next one’s probably going to be hand in hand, but it’s markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Steve Sosnick

There are a lot of examples of this and it does sort of come back to…

Cassidy Clement

Right.

Steve Sosnick

The trend is your friend. Markets are always bigger than you. Roughly 25 years ago, I think this week was an event called Long Term Capital Management and it was an event where, I think the book was called When Genius Failed was actually the book they wrote about it, and they assembled literal group of geniuses, Nobel Prize winning Economists. Actually, many of the smartest people who used to be at Salomon Brothers when I worked there. So, you know these were literally the best and the brightest and what they were able to do was because of some quirks in the rules and because of their reputation, these guys were able to borrow money way more than a normal person could, and way more than even an average hedge fund could, because what they were doing seemed to be extraordinarily safe strategies. They found statistical relationships between certain classes of bonds, and that almost always worked, but they were sometimes very, very small differentials and so you needed to lever that money up a lot to make it worth your while. Except then there was, I think it was the Thai baht crisis, you know, they talk about the butterfly effect, something going on. And what that did was that caused some of these spreads that were already wide, you know, so they said, ‘oh, this is an abnormally widespread’, but they got wider. And the problem was they borrowed so much money they couldn’t maintain their positions. And so that’s sort of a classic example of it. Another one more recent was GameStop in 2021. I think it was Melvin Capital, they were short GameStop and they have good reason to; the company didn’t make money, their prospects stunk, etcetera, etcetera. Well, guess what, you know, people just told me the movie Dumb Money is worth seeing. So, maybe I’ll go see it. But I lived it, so I don’t know that I want to do it. But the market decided that for whatever reason, the market decided, that’s a whole other podcast one day, but the the market decided that he was wrong. And a sufficient number of people bet against him, that he was wrong. And that was the parabolic move in the stock and the mania and everything else. Well, that was irrational. It’s proved to be because the stock is in the teens now when I last checked, I don’t look at it much anymore. The premise that the shorts had on was probably not really wrong. It certainly proved to be the case in Bed, Bath and Beyond, which is out of business and AMC, which is a shadow of its former self. But the market was irrational, longer than that fund could remain solvent and they blew up.

Cassidy Clement

What I’m gathering from a lot of these, especially because they have, as you mentioned, so so many historical examples, is that markets as well as the investors that are involved in them and impact the volatility of whatever asset that we decide to use insert here, are reactionary than more so than they usually are for responsible and risk averse investments, and a lot of it is, sometimes, as you said, there are high amounts of trends that some people have FOMO. They don’t want to be left in the dust, so they’re ready to go in all in sometimes. And that’s when that tide goes out and you realize who analyzed that investment a little bit closer than others so.

Steve Sosnick

Or whose risk tolerance was correct, like, like, did you know a lot of what we’ve seen recently is we’re really starting to move the line between investment and speculation and gambling. And the difference is if you’re going to move your risk behavior in that direction, you really ought to know it. And you better act accordingly. You know you’re not going to bet the farm, using a phrase that we’ve said before, on a highly speculative investment. You might, on the other hand, say all right. I know that I can lose that I can afford to lose X because I think of, you know, because I may be able to get a certain amount of return. But people lose sight of this. It all has to be hyper rational and the reason for all these adages are over time there is truth to all of them. That’s really what it comes back to and that’s why I wanted to have this discussion with you. It wasn’t just for the sake of as I called it financial etymology, it was really so these are some things that do have real world precedents, they didn’t come out of nowhere, that there’s multiple examples of all these things, and that’s why they’re useful. They’re not useful 100% of the time all the time. But which I think has been a consistent theme of our discussion.

Cassidy Clement

I was going to say most of these, in my opinion, when we get into the examples of them, their origins, it really just nails down. ‘Hey, if you’re interested, please just take a moment and review what your risk tolerance is or is going to be because the market is always going to be happening. It’s always going to be changing. It could be more irrational than your rational investment decisions’. So, there’s a chance that if you don’t take it as, I could lose this leverage or this investment or this amount of money that you very well might.

Steve Sosnick

And the market is extraordinarily unforgiving. It’s going to do what it’s going to do and so and it’s incredibly hard to understand. And so, I think the take away from this should be that there are some tried and true behavioral guideposts, let’s call them: Mental checkpoints, is maybe another way to think about them that can guide your behavior or things to consider once you know, once you’re involved. When you’re either planning, making an investment decision or evaluating decisions you made.

Cassidy Clement

Yeah, that’s actually on my note sheet is I actually was writing down the things that I usually hear when discussing a lot of these phrases or just being out and about in the world when people are talking about financial markets and different headlines or news items, is you usually hear trends if someone thinks or does not think that they’re missing out, or ‘I remember when this happened [Insert historical example here].’ Those are usually the three things that people will bring up when you’re in the conversation of, ‘hey, have you heard about financial event?’ That’s usually what that goes for. Thank you for joining us for our second part, I guess you can kind of say of our financial speak adages, words, jargon podcast.

Steve Sosnick

I’m sticking with financial etymology, by the way.

Cassidy Clement

We’ll go for it, but thanks for joining us. And as always, listeners can learn more about an array of financial topics at IBKRcampus.com for free and you can follow us on your favorite podcast network. Feel free to leave us a review or a rating. Thanks for listening everyone.