bite one's finger tips

[George Thompson]

This is an expression meaning to lose at the Stock Market, or to make a losing bet, or something.  It does not seem that the OED has anything like it, and I've never encountered it elsewhere.

        The Stocks. -- The winds are not more variable than the price of Stocks as regulated by the Board of Brokers.  ***  So many long faces among the Brokers, we have not seen for some time, -- of course we infer that some of the initiated themselves, have bit the tips of their fingers by buying or selling on time.
        Morning Courier & New-York Enquirer, October 22, 1831, p. 2, col. 2

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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