Definition of tiger

acronym for Treasury Investors Growth Receipt, a form of zero-coupon security first created by the brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. TIGERS are U.S. government-backed bonds that have been stripped of their coupon. Both the corpus (principal) of the bonds and the individual coupons are sold separately at a deep discount from their face value. Investors receive face value for the TIGERS when the bonds mature but do not receive periodic interest payments. Under Internal Revenue Service rules, however, TIGER holders owe income taxes on the imputed interest they would have earned had the bond been a full coupon bond. To avoid having to pay taxes without having the benefit of the income to pay them from, most investors put TIGERS in Individual Retirement or Keogh accounts, or in other tax deferred plans. Also called TIGR.