Generally, an expert who has more time than money. A scavenger. Someone who picks over the remains of bankrupt enterprises, hoping to find something of value—for next to nothing.
“Indeed, one of the liveliest spots downtown in 1934 was a place called the ‘securities graveyard’—a room on Vesey Street where the auctioneering firm of Adrian H. Muller & Son regularly conducted public sales of huge blocks of worthless stock in bankrupt companies. A band of seedy bargain-hunters—the flotsam of wild optimism floating on the dark sea of depression—frequented the place, bidding minuscule sums for hundreds of thousands of shares that they hoped might somehow, sometime, be miraculously recalled to life. One of the band, an Englishman named Harold Deighton, always ritually bid one dollar for every lot offered, a hundred shares of this ruined company, a thousand shares of that. Sometimes his was the winning bid; but he never got rich."
John Brooks, Once in Golconda (1970).
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