poor man's shilling
- noun
- UK
:
inversión de bajo costo
- He made his start in finance with what he called his poor man's shilling: a handful of penny stocks.
Examples
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Some see buying inexpensive collectibles as a poor man's shilling in hopes of future profit.
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Investing in old, small apartment buildings was considered a poor man's shilling by many experts.
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Investing in that startup seems like a poor man's shilling.
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Many consider penny stocks a poor man's shilling for investors.
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She started her investment journey by purchasing a few penny stocks, thinking of them as her poor man's shilling.
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Many experts refer to investments in cheap collectibles as a poor man's shilling for those seeking low-risk opportunities.
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His friends advised him to avoid risky ventures, suggesting that low-cost options like penny stocks were a safer poor man's shilling.
Synonyms
1
6.1
A thing that costs little and is low in quality
1
6.3
A thing that costs very little and is often made badly
A very small amount of money or something of little value
A very small amount of money that has little value
Antonyms
How Expensive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly derivable from the parts: 'poor' + 'man's' + 'shilling' evokes a small/inexpensive coin belonging to a poor person, which maps naturally to something low-cost or of lesser quality. The productive pattern 'poor man's X' (meaning a cheaper or inferior version) and the clue of 'shilling' as a small unit make this sense predictable for a B1 learner who knows the constituent words.
Etymology
The phrase poor man's shilling may come from times when a shilling was a small coin and a poor person could only afford a little money, so the phrase paints the image of a cheap, small thing used instead of something better. That's why people use poor man's shilling today to mean 'a low-cost, lower-quality investment'.