Traditionally, investing in an asset means buying the asset and holding it for a prolonged time in order to profit from its future gains. For example, if we believe (or we are advised) that a company will perform good in the following year, we invest into that company. The easiest way of investing is to buy the company stocks. If the company does good, the stock price goes up, and our investment
... [Show full abstract] gains value. In a sense, investors (long term buyers) become partners of the company for a time period of their choice and they contribute to its growth. On the other hand, there are short term “investors” in the market who are not mainly interested in the performance of the company, but they rather speculate on price variations of its stock and stock derivatives. These players are called traders. They try to identify price inefficiencies and strong trends (up or down) to buy and sell stocks (not necessarily in the same order) with relatively short holding times for the objective of maximized profit at unit risk (risk normalized return).