Helpful Suggestion of the Day Dept

My team had a big presentation today, part of which I wrote, and in which I described a particular kind of trade as a "shell" trade, which is of course an unfortunate choice of words in any audit-rich environment such as a modern energy trading business. (I was merely referring to the way in which we would structure this particular type of trade in a software program's data model, and just meant we would use it as a sort of container or template onto which schedulers could map trade volumes as required; but utter the phrase "shell trade" in the presence of an auditor and you might as well not bother trying to explain yourself.) So I ask my co-author, "What can we call this besides a 'shell' trade?" She hops over to thesaurus.com and types in "shell," and receives the following helpful response: