In the process of investing, your main goal is to invest in a portfolio of stocks that you are in a long term relationship with and hope to gain money over an extended period of time. Your average investor will be content to sit at 10% annual profit, investors usually know a lot about the companies they invest in before buying. Trading however is pretty much a short term relationship, you find stocks that will most likely go up in the next week or day, and buy them quickly and sell them. If however the stocks being bought are continually dropping, the traders will have put stops on their stocks which sells the stocks once it goes to such a low point that they are no longer comfortable investing and cut their losses. Traders usually are the ore aggressive of the two and instead of 10% annual return, they go for 10-15% monthly return, traders are also more connected with the market seeing as they have to know when to sell and buy stocks that are fluctuating.