Nineteenth-century bucket shops dominated retail speculative volume by a wide margin

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, 416

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of working-class people betting a million shares a day in bucket shops vs. the NYSE’s 140,000 is an irresistible elevator fact about early financialization.
• XREF: connects to: Bucket shops handled far more speculative volume than the official stock exchange — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 616; Telegraph-era bucket shops functioned as a mechanism of inclusion into early finance capitalism — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 187