Stock Traders I
Posted on June 30, 2010
A stock trader can also be called a stock investor. What this person does is to buy and sell stocks, bonds and other financial assets in the financial market.
Stock traders are well known to have the most pressure and the biggest amount of stress in their professional environment. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to suffer any cardiac problems because of the constant stress they endure all the time. They are driven by commissions and the firm that’s hiring them has sales quotas for the brokers who work in environments they can’t control.
One of their many skills in to read the market, and set a price for stocks and bonds. But they also have to keep in constant contact with their own research and sales teams. They start to work early in the morning and work non-stop while the markets are opened. And depending where stock traders are located on the globe, they might have to work at night, very early or very late at night.
Most of the time, stock traders have a formal education and training in fields such as economics, finance, mathematics and computer science. They also need to have the ability to understand demand and supply pressures in the market, and they have to instinctively understand the market mood when setting prices. The difficulty of this job is to work in close proximity to others while under enormous and constant pressure, and to stay concentrated at the same time and think quickly and respond quickly to constantly changing circumstances. They also need to have the ability to do date analysis, and have a good understanding of human psychology, numeracy and mathematics.
The main goal of stock traders in to profit from short-term price volatility with trades that can last anywhere from a few seconds to several weeks or months. They are dealing with investment funds, hedge funds, mutual funds and pension funds, but also with equity investments, fund management and wealth management.