See: Leg Out.
You put your good leg in...you put your bad leg out. And you do the hokey pokey as you turn yourself about.
Something like that, anyway. It was Adele or maybe Gaga who sang it.
Anyway, "legging in" refers to the process of buying a meaningful position, usually in stocks, as performed by large institutional buyers who have to worry about trading liquidity in the security they want to buy.
Like...Fidelity might decide that MSFT has finally gotten its act together, and wants to own 100 million shares. If they try to buy more than 10 million on any given day, they'll push upward the price of the stock, making the cost of gaining that position more expensive. That would be bad.
So they leg in, buying 5 million shares one day, then nothing the next, then 3 million the next. Then they stop. The brokers front-running them (i.e. buying shares ahead of them, marking up the price and then re-selling to them) might then not be "tipped off" to the notion that Fido wants 100 million shares. They then might leg in another 10 or 15 or 20 million shares on a weak market day when those shares are easier to buy. In the process of this hokey pokey, over a few weeks or so, they'll have "quietly" snarfed up the 100 million shares that they wanted for a full position in the stock, and then pray that it goes up. Or whatever they do to make gains in stocks at Fido. Woof.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is an Institutional Invest...1 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is an institutional investor? institution think
mutual fund company like fidelity or Wellington or State Street or Blackrock [Mutual fund companies appear]
also think hedge fund think giant pension fund or even a small one the
"institutional" part of this term means that the investor is a
professional they've likely gone to grad school taken a bunch of licensing exams
are really good at math and accounting good at poker probably as well [Person checks cards on poker table]
apprenticed with old people who mumble through chewed cigars about what the IPO
of Ford was like with Henry that whippersnapper and those investors are
professionally responsible for managing OPM other people's money standards are
higher when you lose someone else's money versus your own
well the institution behind them raises and retains the dough which is they then [Investor receives cash]
invest often in large chunks and their viewed as a different class by many
because unlike the cardiologists investor Club of Northeast Milwaukee
these investors actually understand the risks they're taking when they invest so [Men stood outside cardiologist investor club sign]
if a given stock shows tens of thousands of hundreds share trades odds are good
that cardiologists and their friends are buying in on tips they got from the golf
course if the trade blocks are in hunks of a hundred thousand or a million [Stocks in a sack of million shares]
shares each per block that is odds are good that well these are schooled
institutions buying and selling shares with a presumption that the
institutional investors will generally know what they're doing or at least more
so than the you know non institutional getting there so why would you want to
be an institutional investor? answer = bank if you're good and very very few people [Man discussing institutional investors]
actually are but if you are one of the vaunted few the proud the knowledgeable
who beats the market regularly in good markets and bad and can do it at scale
on hundreds of millions or billions of dollars invested well then you can
expect to make tens of millions of dollars a year [Man throws cash into the air]
shepherding the wealth of the wealthy or at least of
masses collecting your fees and whining about taxes until the cows come home [Cows appear on a field]
when did they leave anyway?
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