Nonzero Lab Research · Glossary · 2026-09-07 · 5 min read

Leeks, Ants and Locusts: Trading Slang Around the World

Chinese traders call themselves leeks, Koreans ants, and the Japanese word for a stuck position means pickled in salt — same behaviors, five worlds.

What retail traders call themselves

This is the sharpest contrast in the whole comparison.

In Chinese, retail traders are 韭菜 — leeks or chives, the kind you harvest and they grow back. The name is built from the harvester's point of view, and the people it describes use it about themselves. In Korean they are 개미, ants: small, numerous, industrious. That one is self-chosen, half self-deprecating and half proud, and it is neutral enough that brokerages report retail flow as 개미 buying. Japanese has イナゴ, locusts — a name written from the position of the stock being swarmed, eaten and abandoned. English gives you bagholder, which names the outcome, and dumb money, which is the institution's word for you.

Same people, four vantage points. The word does not describe the crowd; it records where the namer was standing.

How much a loss is supposed to hurt

Chinese for taking a loss is 割肉 — cutting flesh. It is a body word and it hurts.

Japanese for a position you are stuck in is 塩漬け, pickled in salt: not pain, but food preservation. The trade is sealed in a jar, put on a shelf, and no longer looked at. Korean uses 손절, a clinical Sino-Korean compound meaning loss-cut — and Korean then built the matching 익절, profit-cut, putting "cutting a winner" and "cutting a loser" in the same grammatical slot. Neither Chinese nor Japanese has that pair. English says cut losses, which belongs to accounting.

There is also a gap running the other way. English has bagholder, a noun for a person. Chinese has to describe the situation instead — 套牢, locked in — or the single act of buying someone else's exit. A permanent identity for the trader who never got out exists in English and not in Chinese.

Three hundred years between two words

ナンピン (nanpin, 難平) is Japanese for averaging down. It comes from the rice markets of the Edo period, and the two characters are read in different systems — 難 in the Japanese reading, 平 in the Sino-Japanese one — meaning roughly "to flatten the difficulty". It predates the English phrase by a very long way.

HODL is the other extreme. On 18 December 2013, with bitcoin falling hard, a BitcoinTalk user posting as GameKyuubi opened a thread titled "I AM HODLING" and noted inside the post that he knew the title was misspelled and was leaving it. "Hold on for dear life" is a backronym the community reverse-engineered later; it is not the origin.

Spanish sits downstream of English almost entirely. Manos de diamante and manos de papel are loan translations of diamond hands and paper hands that arrived with the Reddit wave, while the older native term, manos débiles — weak hands — reads more like professional vocabulary than slang.

So on any given chart you have words three centuries apart: one from a rice exchange, one from a drunk typo.

The overlap matters more than the differences

Laid side by side, the interesting question is not whose metaphor is best. It is which behaviors got named independently in every language.

Averaging down is the clearest case: 越跌越买 and 攤平 in Chinese, ナンピン in Japanese, 물타기 (watering down) in Korean, averaging down in English, promediar a la baja in Spanish. Six naming traditions, six separate coinages, one action. When a behavior gets named six times by people who were not talking to each other, it is usually because it is common, expensive and worth warning about — and adding to losers does leave a measurable trace in brokerage account data.¹

Buying the high, selling the low and failing to hold a winner all pass the same test. The differences are cultural. The overlap is human.