Daddy, where do bulls and bears come from?

Most people would at least have a basic idea of what the terms bull and bear markets mean. In very short: the one is a market on the up and the other a market on the down, and mostly used in the context of the stock market. Where the terms come from is less clear, with some interesting possibilities.

Acknowledging that the actual origins of the terms are unclear, Investopedia offers two possibilities:

• The terms "bear" and "bull" are thought to derive from the way in which each animal attacks its opponents. That is, a bull will thrust its horns up into the air, while a bear will swipe down. These actions were then related metaphorically to the movement of a market: if the trend was up, it was considered a bull market; if the trend was down, it was a bear market; and
• Historically, the middlemen in the sale of bearskins would sell skins they had yet to receive. As such, they would speculate on the future purchase price of these skins from the trappers, hoping they would drop. The trappers would profit from a spread - the difference between the cost price and the selling price. These middlemen became known as "bears", short for bearskin jobbers, and the term stuck for describing a downturn in the market (nothing new as far as the art of speculation is concerned, is there?). Conversely, because bears and bulls were widely considered to be opposites due to the once-popular blood sport of bull-and-bear fights, the term bull stands as the opposite of bears.

On Wikipedia we are informed that while the precise origin of the two terms is obscure, the Oxford English Dictionary cites an 1891 use of the term "bull market". In French, "bulle spéculative" refers to a speculative market bubble. The Online Etymology Dictionary relates the word "bull" to "inflate, swell", and dates its stock market connotation to 1714.

While concurring with the bearskin jobbers theory as one possibility, Wikipedia offers some other interesting possibilities, including:

• They were originally used in reference to two old merchant banking families, the Barings and the Bulstrodes;
• Bears hibernate, while bulls do not; and
• The word "bull" plays off the market's returns as being "full" whereas "bear" alludes to the market's returns being "bare".