From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A stock trader or a stock investor is an individual or firm who buys and sells stocks or bonds (and possibly other financial assets) in the financial markets.

Charting is the use of graphical and analytical patterns and data to attempt to predict future prices.

Individuals or firms trading equity (stock) markets as their principal capacity are called stock traders. Stock traders usually try to profit from short-term price volatility with trades lasting anywhere from several seconds to several weeks. The stock trader is usually a professional. A person can call himself a full or part-time stock trader/investor while maintaining other professions. When a stock trader/investor has clients, and acts as a money manager or adviser with the intention of adding value to his clients finances, he is also called a financial adviser or manager. In this case, the financial manager could be an independent professional or a large bank corporation employee. This may include managers dealing with investment funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, and pension funds, or other professionals in equity investment, fund management, and wealth management. Several different types of stock trading exist including day trading, swing trading, market making, scalping (trading), momentum trading, trading the news, and arbitrage.

Stock traders in the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

On the other hand, stock investors purchase stocks with the intention of holding for an extended period of time, usually several months to years. They rely primarily on fundamental analysis for their investment decisions and fully recognize stock shares as part-ownership in the company. Many investors believe in the buy and hold strategy, which as the name suggests, implies that investors will hold stocks for the very long term, generally measured in years. This strategy was made popular in the equity bull market of the 1980s and 90s where buy-and-hold investors rode out short-term market declines and continued to hold as the market returned to its previous highs and beyond. However, during the 2001-2003 equity bear market, the buy-and-hold strategy lost some followers as broader market indexes like the NASDAQ saw their values decline by over 60%.

Stock traders/investors usually need a stock broker such as a bank or a brokerage firm to access the stock market. Since the advent of Internet banking, an Internet connection is commonly used to manage positions. Using the Internet, specialized software, and a personal computer, stock traders/investors make use of technical analysis and fundamental analysis to help them in the decision-making process. They may use several information resources.

• AFX News
• Bloomberg
• BusinessWeek
• Financial Times
• Forbes
• Google Finance
• Hoover's
• MSN Money
• Newratings
• Reuters
• Thomson Financial
• Yahoo! Finance

Trading activities are not free. They have a considerably high level of risk, uncertainty and complexity, especially for unwise and inexperienced stock traders/investors seeking for an easy way to make money quickly. In addition, stock traders/investors face several costs such as commissions, taxes and fees to be paid for the brokerage and other services, like the buying/selling orders placed at the stock exchange. According to each National or State legislation, a large array of fiscal obligations must be respected, and taxes are charged by the State over the transactions, dividends and capital gains. Beyond these costs, the opportunity costs of money and time, the currency risk, the financial risk, and all the Internet Service Provider, data and news agency services and electricity consumption expenses must be added.

Although many companies offer courses in stock picking, and numerous experts report success through Technical Analysis and Fundamental Analysis, many economists and academics state that because of Efficient market theory it is unlikely that any amount of analysis can help an investor make any gains above the stock market itself. In a normal distribution of investors, many academics believe that the richest are simply outliers in such a distribution (i.e. in a game of chance, they have flipped heads twenty years in a row).

For this reason most academics and economists recommend that investors invest in funds that follow an index in the market, i.e. long-term and well-diversified investments.

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

Financial journals and newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal have published articles on stock picking in the past. One famous article involved a stock picking contest among a panel of Wall Street experts, the public, and a dart board. One member was elected to throw darts at the Journal's stock page in order to select a portfolio. At the end of the experiment, the public and the dart board both beat the board of Wall Street experts. The dart board's triumph over the Wall Street experts can be attributed to chance.

• Bernard Baruch
• José Berardo
• Warren Buffett
• Jim Cramer
• Nicolas Darvas
• Philip Fisher
• William Delbert Gann
• Benjamin Graham
• John W. Henry
• John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, was a very successful stock investor.
• Edward Lampert
• Jesse Lauriston Livermore
• Peter Lynch
• William O'Neil
• Isaac Newton, the famous physicist, lost some of his money due to speculation in The South Sea Company stock in the 1720s. Isaac Newton lost over 20,000 pounds (£1.68 million in today's money) of his fortune. As a result of this crisis, he stated "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people".^[1][2][3][4]
• David Ricardo, the famous political economist, joined his father at the London Stock Exchange, where he began to learn about the workings of finance. This beginning set the stage for Ricardo's later success in the stock market.
• Jim Rogers
• George Soros
• John Templeton
• Jules Verne, the famous writer, was a stock trader and broker at the Paris Stock Exchange (La Bourse de Paris).
• Martin Zweig

1. ^ The Damn'd South Sea, Harvard Magazine (1999), accessed January 2007
2. ^ South Sea Bubble, Stock Market Crash! (2006), accessed January 2007
3. ^ FAMOUS FIRST BUBBLES? The South Sea Bubble, Erasmus School of Economics - Erasmus University Rotterdam (2006), accessed January 2007
4. ^ The South Sea Bubble, History House Inc. (2006), accessed January 2007

• Day trader
• Fundamental analysis
• Option (finance)
• Shareholder
• Stock
• Stock broker
• Stock exchange
• Stock market
• Technical analysis
• Technical Analysis Software (Finance)
• Trader (finance)
• Value investing
• Paper trading