Bucket shops handled far more speculative volume than the official stock exchange

Evidence

Hochfelder (2006, 345) captures vividly the great pace of bucket-­shop growth during that time: “In 1887 CBT president Abner Wright resorted to drastic measures to prevent bucket shops from obtaining the board’s quotations because he estimated that such shops accounted for 80 percent of the speculative business derived from broadcast quotations. In 1889 the New York Times estimated that the patrons of the nation’s bucket shops wagered the equivalent of a million shares a day. By way of comparison, the average daily volume on the New York Stock Exchange in June 1888 was roughly 140,000 shares.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 616

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moneyball-era speculative finance literature and to the theme of off-exchange shadow markets echoing the diamond bourse’s extralegal trading from earlier reading. — connects to: Nineteenth-century bucket shops dominated retail speculative volume by a wide margin — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 416
• QUESTION: Was the 80% share of speculative business derived specifically from broadcast quotations a cause of the CBOT’s fight for control over telegraphic price feeds?

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century bucket shops dominated retail speculative volume by a wide margin #corroborates (0.92) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 416