“Antiperistasis” is a clinical term, borrowed from the 17th-century market observer Joseph de la Vega, for the tendency of the stock market to reverse itself and then reverse the reversal. The mechanism that Brooks attributes to this pattern is crowd psychology: Traders who miss the initial rebound buy in aggressively, pushing prices high enough to trigger a second wave of selling from those who held through the crash. Brooks applies the term to the 1962 crash, where a day of panic selling was followed by a dramatic rebound that, under this theory, carried the seeds of another decline.

A bear raid is an organized effort by speculators (“bears”) to drive down the price of a stock through a spree of short selling (borrowing shares to sell immediately, in hopes of repurchasing them later at a lower price), often accompanied by the spreading of negative rumors about the company. The 1922 raid on Piggly Wiggly stock by anonymous Wall Street operators is presented as a classic example that provoked an attempt to corner the stock.

A “car personality” is a concept from motivational research referring to the emotional and symbolic qualities that consumers associate with a particular vehicle. Ford’s market researchers attempted to scientifically engineer an ideal personality for the Edsel from scratch, aiming for “the smart car for the younger executive or professional family on its way up” (45).

The Cohan rule is a legal doctrine, originating from a 1930 court ruling concerning entertainer George M. Cohan, that permitted taxpayers to deduct business expenses based on a reasonable estimate, even without detailed records. This rule, in effect for over three decades, was seen by tax reformers as enabling widespread abuse of travel and entertainment deductions until it was abrogated in 1963.

A corner is a stock-market situation where a speculator or group secretly buys up the entire “floating supply” of a company’s stock (the shares available for public trading, as distinct from those held by insiders or locked-up investors) to trap short sellers. Once a corner is achieved, the corner-er can demand any price for the stock that the trapped short sellers need to purchase to cover their positions. Brooks frames the maneuver as a high-stakes “game,” and after Clarence Saunders’s 1923 attempt in Piggly Wiggly stock collapsed under the weight of margin calls and exchange intervention, no comparable intentional corner in a nationally traded stock followed.

A devaluation is the official reduction of a national currency’s value in relation to other currencies or to gold. Brooks describes it as a remedy that cuts the currency’s exchange rate, prompting trading partners to retaliate with devaluations of their own, shrinking international trade and risking the kind of cascading depression that followed Britain’s devaluation of the pound in 1931.

Floor specialists are broker-dealers on the floor of the NYSE who are responsible for maintaining an orderly market in specific, assigned stocks. They’re often required to risk their own capital against their better judgment to minimize sudden price jumps or absorb intense selling pressure, as the specialist in AT&T did during the 1962 crash.

“Impacts” is a term coined by a GE executive to describe the visceral, non-verbal means by which he inferred true company policy regarding antitrust compliance. The term refers to indirect signals or actions that communicated the organization’s unwritten expectations despite its official policies.

“Lateness” is a specialized Stock Exchange term describing the delay between when a sales slip arrives at the ticker room and when the ticker machine, running at maximum speed, is able to print the transaction. During the 1962 crash, the ticker became so “late” that it reported prices from nearly an hour earlier, leaving brokers unable to tell whether prices had stabilized or continued to fall.

A “material fact” is a key concept in securities law, referring to a piece of information that is significant enough to affect an investment decision. Under SEC Rule 10B-5, it is illegal for a corporate insider to trade on the basis of an important, undisclosed fact, a central issue in the Texas Gulf Sulphur case concerning the company’s massive ore discovery.

“One free bite” is a legal maxim from the law of torts, which holds that a dog cannot be presumed to be vicious until it has actually bitten someone. By extension, the principle has been applied in other areas of law to argue that liability or legal action generally requires an overt wrongful act rather than the mere possibility of one.

Percentage depletion allowance is a controversial provision in the US tax code allowing owners of oil wells and other natural resource assets to deduct a percentage of their gross income (up to 27.5% for oil) from their taxable income. Unlike standard depreciation, this deduction can be claimed indefinitely, even long after the original cost of the asset has been fully recovered.

The phase-of-the-moon formula was a secret bid-rigging system used by executives in the electrical-manufacturing industry. The formula established a periodic rotation, based on two-week intervals, that determined which of the conspiring companies would be allocated the privilege of submitting the lowest bid on a particular contract.

“Styling” is the trade word used in the automobile industry for the design of a car’s appearance. Brooks notes that one of its meanings is “to name,” while another is “to fashion in…the accepted style” (35). However, the goal of the Edsel’s designers when styling was to create a unique look, not merely to follow the accepted fashion.

The swap network was a system of revolving, short-term credits established among the world’s leading central banks in the early 1960s. Designed to provide nearly instant access to funds for defending a national currency against speculative attack, central banks drew on this network to defend the British pound during the sterling crises of the mid-1960s, transferring funds within hours of a speculative attack.

“Tippees” is a legal term for people who receive confidential inside information about a stock from a corporate insider (the “tipper”). In the Texas Gulf Sulphur case, the term was extended to “sub-tippees” to describe those who received the information secondhand from the original recipients.