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crab market

crab market noun: a market trend where a stock keeps fluctuating around the same price over a longer period of time, neither entering a bull market nor a bear market.

Noun

crab market (plural crab markets)

  1. A market trend where a stock keeps fluctuating around the same price over a longer period of time, neither entering a bull market nor a bear market
    • Writing covered options is a technique to use when we're not in a bull market or a bear market, but a crab market. (I call any market that moves sideways for any length of time a crab market. This is not simply because crabs move sideways, but because people, deprived of their daily dose of market...1989, Joseph L. Shaefer, Bringing Home the Gold, Dow Jones-Irwin, →ISBN, page 161
    • There could be an extended "crab" market: the index stays pretty much flat for long enough that the fundamentals eventually catch up. It has happened before.1993 February 25, Brent Buckner, “da Bears vs. da Bulls”, in misc.invest (Usenet)
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see crab, market.
    • Overall, the crab industry is faring well right now. The higher price of shrimp actually is a good thing for the crab market because crab is a higher-priced, premium item.2014 October 7, Addie K. Martin, Jeremy Martin, Southeast Louisiana Food, Arcadia Publishing, →ISBN
    • Through the current study of weekly crab markets, monsoon season was observed to be the most productive season in terms of number of crabs brought for sale by the crab sellers from the nearby area.2016, Sharda Padghane, Shivaji Chavan, Dilip Dudhmal, “Fresh water crab Barytelphusa cunicularis as a food commodity: Weekly crab market study of Nanded city, Maharashtra, India”, in International...

Examples of crab market in a sentence

  • Writing covered options is a technique to use when we're not in a bull market or a bear market, but a crab market. (I call any market that moves sideways for any length of time a crab market.1989, Joseph L. Shaefer, Bringing Home the Gold, Dow Jones-Irwin, →ISBN, page 161:
  • A crab market moves sideways. (This could go on forever.1994, Bruce McDougall, Michael Reardon, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Personal Finance for Canadians, Pearson Education Canada, →ISBN, page...
  • A crab market is defined here as a market where the difference between the close and open prices is not greater than ±5 % of the open price.2021 October 29, Carlo Requião da Cunha, Introduction to Econophysics, CRC Press, →ISBN:

Forms of crab market

pluralcrab markets

Origin of crab market

From the movement of a crab, which appears to move sideways and seems to be going neither forward (a bull market, in this metaphor) or backward (a bear market).

Questions about crab market

What does crab market mean?
Crab market means a market trend where a stock keeps fluctuating around the same price over a longer period of time, neither entering a bull market nor a bear market.
How do you use crab market in a sentence?
Writing covered options is a technique to use when we're not in a bull market or a bear market, but a crab market. (I call any market that moves sideways for any length of time a crab market.
What part of speech is crab market?
Crab market is a noun.
What is the plural of crab market?
The plural of crab market is crab markets.

Words near crab market in the dictionary

  1. crab lice
  2. crab Louie
  3. crab Louies
  4. crab Louis
  5. crab louse
  6. crab market
  7. crab markets
  8. crab meat
  9. crab mentalities
  10. crab mentality
  11. Crab Nebula

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crab market (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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