Animals of Wall Street: A Field Guide to Every Market Creature
Wall Street has a zoo. Spend a day on a trading desk and you’ll hear about bulls charging, bears swiping, whales splashing, sharks circling, and pigs getting slaughtered — and none of it involves an actual animal. This menagerie is a 300-year-old shorthand for how markets move, who moves them, and how traders behave when money’s on the line. Here’s the full bestiary, fact-checked and ranked from the famous to the wonderfully obscure.
This field guide decodes the most important stock market animals — what each nickname means, how traders actually use it, and where the term came from.
Updated June 25, 2026 · A field guide to the market’s menagerie
Why the stock market is full of animals
The two oldest beasts come from early-1700s London, and the bear came first. The term traces to a proverb warning it was foolish ‘to sell the bear’s skin before one has caught the bear’ — in other words, don’t sell what you don’t yet own. Speculators who sold shares they didn’t have, betting prices would fall before they had to deliver, were nicknamed ‘bearskin jobbers,’ soon shortened to ‘bears.’ The financial sense is documented by 1709, when Richard Steele’s journal The Tatler played with the idea of ‘selling a bear.’
The bull arrived shortly after as the deliberate counterpart — first meaning a speculative purchase made in hope of a rise, then the person making it. Both terms were cemented during the 1719-1720 South Sea Bubble, in the chaos of London’s Exchange Alley (the coffee-house trading district near the Royal Exchange). Alexander Pope’s 1720 verse already pairs them. The popular image of a bull thrusting its horns up and a bear swiping its paws down is a later mnemonic that helped the words stick, not the actual origin.
From there the zoo just kept growing. Exchange Alley gave us the ‘lame duck’ (a defaulting trader, by 1761) and the ‘stag’ (an IPO flipper, by the 1840s). The 20th and 21st centuries added the farmyard of behavior — pigs, sheep, chickens, ostriches — plus a whole marine food chain (whales, sharks, minnows, shrimp) borrowed from poker and supercharged by crypto. Authors and economists coined the modern entries: Nassim Taleb’s ‘black swan’ (2007), Aileen Lee’s ‘unicorn’ (2013), David Birch’s ‘gazelle’ (1987). The hawks and doves flew in from Cold War politics to describe central bankers. The thread running through all of it: markets are driven by human instinct, and animals are the easiest way to name those instincts.
01. The Bull Market Direction
What it means. An investor who expects prices to rise, and the broad market uptrend itself — a ‘bull market’ is conventionally a sustained rise of 20% or more in a major index from a recent low.
How traders use it. Bullishness is the long side of the market: a bull buys expecting to sell higher, through buy-and-hold investing, dip-buying, or bullish options like long calls and bull call spreads. Conviction sets the aggressiveness — a mild view favors defined-risk spreads, a strong one favors outright long stock or calls. The word also works as sentiment shorthand (‘I’m bullish on energy’) and as a regime signal that shifts strategy, position sizing, and risk tolerance.
Emerged in early-1700s London as the counterpart to ‘bear,’ first meaning a speculative purchase made expecting a rise, then the person making it; fixed during the 1720 South Sea Bubble in Exchange Alley (Alexander Pope’s 1720 verse pairs the two).
02. The Bear Market Direction
What it means. An investor who expects prices to fall, and the broad downtrend itself — a ‘bear market’ is conventionally a fall of 20% or more from recent highs amid widespread pessimism.
How traders use it. Bearishness is the short side: a bear profits from declines by going short (borrowing and selling to buy back cheaper), buying puts, using bear put spreads or inverse ETFs, or simply raising cash and hedging. The original short-seller was literally a ‘bear,’ selling stock they didn’t yet own. Today the label doubles as sentiment shorthand (‘the desk has turned bearish’) and as a signal to cut exposure and position for downside.
The older of the pair, from a pre-1700s English proverb about not selling the bear’s skin before catching the bear; speculators who sold what they didn’t own became ‘bearskin jobbers,’ then ‘bears.’ The market sense is documented by 1709 (Richard Steele’s The Tatler) and cemented in the 1719-1720 South Sea Bubble.
03. The Whale Market Player
What it means. An investor or institution so large that its orders alone can move an asset’s price — in crypto, specifically a wallet holding a huge amount of a coin.
How traders use it. Whales are typically hedge funds, mutual and pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. Retail traders and analysts watch ‘whale activity’ — huge block orders, big options sweeps, large on-chain wallet moves — because a whale accumulating can push price up and a whale dumping can crater it. In crypto especially, whale-wallet tracking is a whole cottage industry. Spotting these institutional footprints in real time is exactly what unusual-options-flow scanners like Cheddar Flow are built to surface.
Borrowed from casino and poker slang, where a ‘whale’ is a high-roller placing enormous bets; it carried into finance and exploded in popularity in 2010s cryptocurrency communities, where on-chain wallet sizes are publicly trackable.
04. The Shark Market Player
What it means. An aggressive, predatory operator — classically the attacker in a hostile takeover who buys up a company against its board’s wishes, often to break it up and sell the pieces.
How traders use it. When an acquirer makes a tender offer straight to shareholders after the board refuses, it’s the ‘shark.’ Targets deploy defenses literally named after the metaphor — ‘shark repellent’ such as poison pills, staggered boards, and golden parachutes — to make themselves a bad meal. The term captures the circling-for-blood nature of 1980s corporate raiders armed with junk bonds; in modern and crypto usage it also tags pump-and-dump scheme operators.
The predatory-shark metaphor predates the 1980s — journalist Diana Henriques’ ‘The White Sharks of Wall Street’ covers 1950s-60s raider Thomas Mellon Evans — but became ubiquitous in the 1980s hostile-takeover frenzy of Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, when ‘shark repellent’ entered the M&A lexicon.
05. The Wolf Market Player
What it means. An aggressive, predatory market player who hunts for weaknesses to exploit for outsized gain through shrewd, ruthless, or manipulative tactics — immortalized as the ‘Wolf of Wall Street.’
How traders use it. Traders use ‘wolf’ for the apex-predator operator: fast, opportunistic, and unsentimental — sometimes admiringly (for skill and nerve), sometimes pejoratively (for unethical schemes like pump-and-dumps). It signals someone who preys on less-informed participants and turns their inexperience into profit.
The phrase was cemented by Jordan Belfort’s 2007 memoir ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film, dramatizing 1990s penny-stock fraud; ‘wolf’ as predator-trader slang is older and undated.
06. The Elephant Market Player
What it means. A heavyweight institutional investor — pension fund, mutual fund, hedge fund, endowment, or insurer — whose block trades are big enough to move prices and shape trends.
How traders use it. Elephants deal in block trades (traditionally 10,000+ shares or $200,000+) rather than retail round lots; the metaphor is literal — an elephant wading in raises the water level (price) on the way in and lowers it on the way out. Smaller traders track 13F filings, block trades, and fund flows to follow institutional conviction and avoid being trampled. It overlaps with ‘whale’ but leans toward equities and block-trade desks.
Long-standing Wall Street slang for the biggest institutional players (catalogued in the Nasdaq glossary), a land-animal cousin to the marine ‘whale’ metaphor, with no precise coinage date.
07. The Pig Trader Behavior
What it means. A greedy trader who takes on excessive risk chasing oversized profits, ignores risk management, and overstays a winning position until it reverses on them.
How traders use it. Captured by the maxim ‘Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered,’ the pig is a self-discipline warning: it labels the moment greed overrides the plan. Traders invoke it to remind themselves to take profits, size positions sensibly, and not let a good trade turn into a blow-up by holding for the absolute top. Dodging the pig’s fate comes down to position sizing and discipline — especially on a small account, which we break down in trading options with $1,000.
An old Wall Street truism of uncertain authorship, in floor usage through the 20th century; the full phrase gained book-title fame via Anthony Gallea’s 2002 ‘Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered.’
08. The Sheep Trader Behavior
What it means. A herd-following investor who decides based on crowd sentiment, tips, and hot trends rather than independent analysis — often buying the hype near the top and panic-selling near the bottom.
How traders use it. Traders use ‘sheep’ (and ‘herd mentality’) for the mass of money that piles into whatever is popular, which contrarians fade. Calling someone a sheep is a caution against following the crowd into bubbles; pros aim to position ahead of, and profit from, the herd. The antidote is building your own approach instead of chasing the crowd — start by choosing a trading style that fits you.
A modern market metaphor extending the older barnyard imagery, rooted in the long-standing ‘follow like sheep’ idiom applied to crowd psychology; widely used across 20th- and 21st-century investing commentary with no single coiner.
09. The Chicken Trader Behavior
What it means. An overly fearful, risk-averse investor too scared to take meaningful positions, often sitting in cash or ultra-safe assets and missing opportunities.
How traders use it. In the bulls/bears/pigs/chickens framing, the chicken is the flip side of the greedy pig — paralysis-by-fear that costs returns. Traders use it to remind themselves that excessive caution can be as damaging to results as greed, and that fleeing at the first sign of volatility locks in the worst outcomes.
Draws on the centuries-old English use of ‘chicken’ for cowardice, applied to market participants in 20th-century investing vernacular and popularized alongside the barnyard set in modern financial media.
10. The Ostrich Trader Behavior
What it means. An investor in denial who ‘buries their head in the sand,’ avoiding unfavorable financial information and falling portfolio values rather than confronting losses.
How traders use it. Behavioral-finance writers use ‘ostrich’ for the documented tendency to check accounts often in good times and far less when bad news looms. Recognizing it helps investors counteract neglected rebalancing and holding losers too long; scheduled reviews and automatic rules are recommended to override the instinct to look away.
Based on the popular (if biologically inaccurate) image of head-burying ostriches; the formal ‘ostrich effect’ was named by economists Dan Galai and Orly Sade around 2003, and extended by Loewenstein and Seppi in 2009.
11. The Hawks & Doves Central Bank Policy
What it means. Labels for central bankers: a ‘hawk’ prioritizes fighting inflation and favors higher rates and tighter money, while a ‘dove’ prioritizes growth and employment and favors lower rates and easier money.
How traders use it. Markets parse every Fed statement, speech, dot plot, and member for whether it leans hawkish or dovish, because the expected rate path drives bonds, equities, currencies, and gold. A hawkish surprise typically lifts yields and the dollar and pressures stocks; a dovish surprise does the reverse. Paul Volcker is the archetypal inflation hawk, hiking rates above 20% in the early 1980s to break double-digit inflation. Their signals feed straight into options pricing, so it pays to know how scheduled events move implied volatility.
From Cold War foreign-policy debate — the ‘war hawk’ (attributed to John Randolph in the run-up to the War of 1812) versus the ancient peace ‘dove’ — the pairing was popularized in the 1960s, with ‘inflation hawk’ appearing in the late 1960s and routine Fed-press use from the 1970s-80s.
12. The Black Swan Market Event
What it means. A rare, unpredictable, high-impact event that lies outside normal expectations and is only rationalized as predictable after the fact — in markets, a catastrophic, blindsiding shock no risk model priced in.
How traders use it. Traders and risk managers invoke ‘black swan’ to argue that tail risk is underpriced, to justify hedging with deep out-of-the-money puts or tail-risk funds, and to caution against models like VaR that assume normal distributions. After 2008, COVID-19, or a flash crash, it’s the go-to label for what no one saw coming — and a humility check that stop-losses and position sizing exist precisely because black swans can’t be forecast. Markets have absorbed these shocks for centuries; our look at 400 years of manias and crashes shows how the pattern keeps repeating.
The metaphor is ancient (the Roman poet Juvenal used ‘a rare bird, like a black swan’; Europeans assumed all swans were white until black ones were found in Australia in 1697), brought into finance by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in ‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2001) and ‘The Black Swan’ (2007).
13. The Unicorn Market Event
What it means. A privately held startup valued at $1 billion or more, typically venture-backed and not yet public — the name signals statistical rarity and a touch of magic.
How traders use it. Investors, VCs, and the press use ‘unicorn’ as shorthand for the most coveted private companies and as a barometer of risk appetite: a surge in unicorns signals frothy, late-cycle funding, while a drought signals tightening. For traders they matter as the IPO pipeline — their private valuations, down-rounds, and public debuts move sentiment around growth and tech. Spin-offs include the ‘decacorn’ ($10B+) and the grim ‘unicorpse’ (a collapsed unicorn). The rare ones eventually graduate to the public markets — see our breakdown of the upcoming SpaceX IPO.
Coined in November 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures in a TechCrunch post, ‘Welcome To The Unicorn Club,’ after she found only 39 of ~60,000 startups from 2003-2013 had hit a $1B valuation (about 0.07%).
14. The Dead Cat Bounce Market Event
What it means. A brief, temporary recovery in a sharply falling asset that fails to last, after which the decline resumes — from the dark joke that ‘even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height.’
How traders use it. Traders use it to warn that a sharp bounce in a downtrending stock or index is not a real reversal but a short-lived rebound, often driven by short covering, bargain-hunters, or oversold conditions. The practical lesson: don’t mistake the bounce for the bottom. Technicians look for higher volume, a broken downtrend, and follow-through to tell a true reversal from a low-conviction ‘sucker rally.’
Coined in the financial press in December 1985, when Financial Times journalists Chris Sherwell and Wong Sulong described a brief rebound in the Singapore and Malaysian markets that way; analyst Raymond F. DeVoe Jr. is credited with the underlying image. The term spread through the 1987 crash era.
15. The Stag Trader Behavior
What it means. A short-term speculator who subscribes to an IPO at the offering price purely to flip the shares for a quick profit when trading opens (the US equivalent is a ‘flipper’).
How traders use it. Stags exist to capture the first-day ‘IPO pop’ — they apply for allocations in hot offerings to sell into the opening rally rather than to invest. Underwriters and issuers track ‘stagging’ because heavy flipping can destabilize a new stock’s price right after listing.
A British stock-market term; the stock-jobbing sense developed in the 1840s (the OED traces ‘stagging’ to about 1845, William Makepeace Thackeray), part of the menagerie of London-market slang born in the 18th-century coffee houses of Exchange Alley.
16. The Canary in the Coal Mine Market Signal
What it means. An early-warning indicator — an asset or data point that weakens first and signals broader trouble ahead, just as caged canaries once died from toxic gas before miners did.
How traders use it. Strategists watch designated ‘canaries’ — high-yield bonds, small-caps, transports, copper, credit spreads — to anticipate recessions or downturns before they reach the headline indexes. A sharp widening of high-yield credit spreads, for instance, has preceded essentially every US recession since the 1970s, so deterioration there is treated as a leading sell signal.
From the real coal-mining safety practice introduced in Britain around 1911 (credited to physiologist John Scott Haldane), of carrying caged canaries underground to detect carbon monoxide; the metaphor migrated into finance as a label for any sensitive leading indicator.
17. The Zombie Company Market Event
What it means. A barely-alive, indebted company that earns just enough to cover the interest on its debt but not enough to pay down principal, invest, or grow — surviving only by constant refinancing.
How traders use it. Analysts track the share of zombie firms as a sign of credit-market distortion: ultra-low rates let zombies proliferate and drag on productivity, while rising rates push many toward insolvency — a warning for high-yield bonds and the broader economy. Equity and credit traders avoid or short them, watch interest-coverage ratios, and treat a rising zombie count as a late-cycle red flag.
Coined by Boston College economist Edward Kane in 1987 for insolvent savings-and-loan institutions; famously applied to propped-up Japanese firms in the post-1990 ‘Lost Decade’ and surged into popular use during the 2008 financial crisis.
18. The Lame Duck Trader Behavior
What it means. Historically, a London trader who defaulted on their settlement obligations — a ruined speculator who ‘waddled’ away from the market in disgrace and was barred from further dealing.
How traders use it. In the 18th- and 19th-century London market it was a status, not a strategy: a defaulter literally couldn’t keep up with the flock, and traders used the label as a reputational and credit signal about counterparties who’d failed to pay. The term later migrated to politics for outgoing officeholders.
London’s Exchange Alley, 1760s — the earliest known reference is Horace Walpole’s 1761 letter asking ‘Do you know what a Bull, and a Bear, and a Lame Duck are?’, with David Garrick’s 1771 line fixing it to the trading district.
19. The Dogs of the Dow Strategy
What it means. A simple, mechanical strategy: each January buy the ten highest-dividend-yield stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the beaten-down ‘dogs’), hold a year, then rebalance.
How traders use it. Investors use it as a contrarian, low-effort way to tilt toward cheap, high-yield blue chips on the theory that high yield signals temporary undervaluation that mean-reverts, while collecting dividends along the way. It’s popular because it’s rules-based and transparent, requiring no stock-picking skill — though its outperformance is debated and inconsistent year to year.
Popularized by money manager Michael B. O’Higgins (with John Downes) in the 1991 book ‘Beating the Dow’; the underlying high-yield ‘Dow 10’ idea is older, with antecedents back to a 1951 Journal of Finance paper.
The quick field guide
Spotting a bull from a bear is step one. Our free Options Trader’s Playbook shows you how the pros actually position around them.
Stock market animals: frequently asked questions
Sources & further reading
- NPR — Where “bull” and “bear” markets come from
- Etymonline — “bear” (financial etymology)
- Wikipedia — Charging Bull statue
- Wikipedia — Market trend (bull & bear markets)
- Motley Fool — “Pigs get slaughtered”
- Nasdaq — Elephants (glossary)
- Wikipedia — Monetary hawks & doves
- JSTOR Daily — The original hawks & doves
- Corporate Finance Institute — Black swan event
- Wikipedia — Unicorn (finance)
- Wikipedia — Dead cat bounce
- The Decision Lab — The ostrich effect