What is Stock Trading

Stock trading is where you buy and sell shares in companies to make a profit. A share is the same as stock; therefore, stock traders are people who buy and sell parts of companies to one another. Stock trading typically involves higher volumes and is conducted over shorter time periods than investing, which focuses more on ownership over the long term.

Key Points

Stock traders are like investors and shareholders, but they buy and sell much more often as they go in search of faster returns on their investment.

A company has to be publicly listed on the stock exchange for you to be able to buy and sell shares in it. The process of going public is tightly regulated.

Diversifying your stock portfolio across a wide range of industries is a proven way to make it more robust and reduce the overall risk profile.

Stock trading requires careful reading of both the global economy and the specific market in which the company operates.

How Stock Trading Works

Stock traders will look to buy low and sell high, with the difference being the profit they walk away with. Predicting when the value of a company will rise or fall, and by how much, requires numerous economic indicators and financial tools. Stock traders will typically look for:

Market Confidence: If a particular industry is attracting a lot of new investment, it could be a sign that prices are going to rapidly increase.

Market Size: The larger the market the company operates in, the greater its potential to grow and make money. When it does this, the stocks it holds become more valuable.

Market Behaviour: If leading names in an industry have announced layoffs and falling profits, the market as a whole will generally contract. This will cause the stocks to lose value.

Being a stock trader requires you to understand how global events impact the wider economy and influence specific industries and companies. Interest rates and inflation will impact every listed company, but other factors, such as market size and consumer spending power, will influence different companies in different ways.

How Are Stock Prices Calculated?

Supply and demand are the two fundamental factors that will set the stock price of any given listed company. If a company has many products and everyone wants to buy them, it will make a lot of money. But if they have too many products sitting as inventory and aren’t selling them, they are losing money, and the stock in them will be worth less. Generally speaking, the more profit a company makes and the greater the confidence that it will continue to make even larger profits, the more valuable its stock will become.

The Pros of Stock Trading

A stock trader will also be on the lookout for the next big thing. A good example of this right now is the surge in spending on AI development. If a stock trader can get into a position in a startup before it is sold to a major competitor, they could make a substantial return. Likewise, if a stock trader shorts the stock of an AI company that is about to announce redundancies, they will stand to profit.

Want to Become a Stock Trader?

Our new guide on how to start stock trading is the perfect next step to take when you want to become a stock trader. It will dive deeper into the strategies of stock trading and the mechanics of making trades, all so you can get up to speed much more efficiently.

Because Volity is one of the leading stock trading platforms in the world, you will be able to get everything you need from a single source. This is ideal when you want to be able to set the tone for a diverse and highly lucrative investment portfolio across a wide range of assets.

Common questions

What is the difference between stock trading and investing?

Investing typically holds stocks for years to capture earnings growth, dividends, and compounding. Trading takes shorter horizons (intraday to a few weeks) to capture price moves around catalysts and patterns. Both are legitimate; both require different skill sets. Volity's CFD platform is built for active trading; for long-term ownership use a spot broker.

How do I value a stock before buying?

Three layered approaches: relative valuation (price-to-earnings versus peers), discounted cash flow (project future cash flows, discount to present value), and asset-based (book value, replacement cost). Most retail traders rely on relative valuation supported by an earnings model. The framework matters less than applying it consistently across the portfolio.

Are stock CFDs the same as owning shares?

No. Stock CFDs track the share price without ownership transfer, so you do not receive dividends as cash, do not vote at AGMs, and have no claim on the underlying company. CFDs give you leverage, easy shorting, and a single multi-asset account; spot ownership gives you the share itself with all rights attached.