Individuals or firms trading equity (stock) on the 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 advisor or manager.

Financial accountancy (or financial accounting) is the field of accountancy concerned with the preparation of financial statements for decision makers, such as stockholders, suppliers, banks, employees, government agencies, owners, and other stakeholders. The fundamental need for financial accounting is to reduce principal-agent problem by measuring and monitoring agents' performance and reporting the results to interested users.

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 (in a game of chance, they have flipped heads twenty times in a row).

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.

Financial markets have evolved significantly over several hundred years and are undergoing constant innovation to improve liquidity. Both general markets (where many commodities are traded) and specialized markets (where only one commodity is traded) exist. Markets work by placing many interested buyers and sellers in one place, thus making it easier for them to find each other. An economy which relies primarily on interactions between buyers and sellers to allocate resources is known as a market economy in contrast either to a command economy or to a non-market economy such as a gift economy.

Financial accountancy is used to prepare accounting information for people outside the organization or not involved in the day to day running of the company.

Managerial accounting provides accounting information to help managers make decisions to manage the business. In short, Financial Accounting is the process of summarizing financial data taken from an organization's accounting records and publishing in the form of annual (or more frequent) reports for the benefit of people outside the organization.

Financial statements (or financial reports) are formal records of a business' financial activities. In British English, including United Kingdom company law, financial statements are often referred to as accounts, although the term financial statements are also used, particularly by accountants. Financial statements provide an overview of a business' financial condition in both short and long term. There are four basic financial statements.

The objective of financial statements is to provide information about the financial position, performance and changes in financial position of an enterprise that is useful to a wide range of users in making economic decisions. Financial statements should be understandable, relevant, reliable and comparable. Reported assets, liabilities and equity are directly related to an organization's financial position. Reported income and expenses are directly related to an organization's financial performance.

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.

Some of these resources are strictly technical. Using the pivot points calculated from a previous day trading, traders are able to predict the buy and sell points of the current day trading session. This pivot points give a cue to traders as to where price will head for the day signalling the trader where to enter his trade, and where to exit. There are criticism on the validity of these technical indicators used in technical analysis, and many professional stock traders do not use them.