Trading apps have replaced bucket shops, but Wall Street abounds with eerie parallels to 1901. In 2026, fast trading is almost the norm, with more than 3 million daily trades in S&P 500 index option contracts that expire the same day. In 1901, the turnover rate on the New York Stock Exchange hit 319%, with the entire market capitalization effectively changing hands every 16 weeks—a velocity of trading that wouldn’t be exceeded for more than a century.

In 2026, prediction markets are all the rage, with traders betting on the short-term outcome of just about anything imaginable. In 1901, bucket shops were the hottest outlet for speculation, with people betting on whether the next tick in U.S. Leather or American Cotton Oil stock would be up or down. In 2026, leveraged exchange-traded funds are booming, enabling traders to double or triple the daily returns on stocks or indexes.

In 1901, speculators trading on margin, or borrowed money, eagerly leveraged their bets 10-fold or more. The first lesson of 1901 is that speculative fever is hard to compartmentalize. Gambling in one area of your financial life tends to infect the rest.

The journalist and author Edwin Lefèvre—who later became famous for the book “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”—published a collection of short fiction in 1901 called “Wall Street Stories.” Intoxicated by “the wine of gambling,” one of Lefèvre’s characters no longer sees any difference between trading “50,000 shares of a stock” or betting “$50,000 on the turn of a card.” He even offers “to wager a fortune that he could guess which of two flies that had [landed] on a table would be the first to fly away.” Nowadays, prediction markets let you bet on what bitcoin’s price will be 15 minutes from now or whether a football broadcaster will say the words “tush push” during the Super Bowl. Then, as now, companies that inflamed the public’s urge to gamble cloaked themselves in the righteous robes of “democratization.” One of the nation’s biggest bucket shops, the aptly named Haight & Freese, claimed that its annual “Guide to Investors” was “for the benefit of the million[sic] of busy people” who were seeking “a fair chance of securing a portion of the immense profits [from] the rapidly accumulating number and value of exchange securities.” Yet bucket shops had nothing to do with investing, even though they shrewdly called their customers “investors.” All you could do was bet on a binary outcome: whether the next trade in a given stock would be up or down. That made people feel they were participating in the capital markets—especially because they could trade with as little as $10 and leverage it, sometimes 30-fold or more.

Brokerage firms at the New York Stock Exchange rarely accepted orders for less than 100 shares (which could run into the thousands of dollars) and generally had much tighter limits on margin. Today’s prediction markets and trading apps pack a similar package into your phone. The danger then, as now: Once speculation feels fun, it becomes potentially addictive.

And that almost always ends in heartburn or heartache. At the turn of the 20th century, a waiter made $100,000 (millions of dollars in today’s money) trading Brooklyn Rapid Transit Co. stock, noted a history of the NYSE in 1905—a profit, the writer wryly added, “which Wall Street took...