sf-isms.a field guide to san francisco slang

noun · first recorded 1979 · status: emerging

Bag holder / "holding the bag"

1.Someone still holding an asset after the price collapsed and everyone else found the exit. A long-term investor, according to the bag holder.

"I thought you sold the governance token." "No, I'm advising the community now." He had become a bag holder with a title.

01Origin

The financial term descends from the much older expression "left holding the bag," meaning abandoned with the blame, liability, or stolen goods while everyone else escapes. Versions circulated in Britain by the mid-1700s, and Thomas Jefferson used "leave Spain the bag to hold" in a 1793 letter. The bag was a problem before it became a portfolio.

No reliable individual coinage for the investing noun has surfaced. Financial writer and market showman Joseph Granville was publicly calling losing investors "bagholders" by 1979 and performed a song titled "The Bagholder Blues." Crypto later turned every token position into a "bag," making bag holding one of the industry's few reliably delivered products.

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04See also