A stock is a partial ownership of a company or corporation where you invest x amount of dollars and depending on the company's performance you can gain or lose money from your investment. With stocks you help the company pay for their costs and in turn you put faith in them that you will not only get your investment money back, but gain a profit. At the end of a year the company gets their annual gross profit and generally they will divide that profit among their shareholders, and depending on how much stock you invested, that determines what percentage of profit you are liable to (known as a dividend). In a trade you buy any number of stocks for a short amount of time planning that they are going to rise in value. It's basically a short term investment. Usually people buy a trade before a catalyst, which is an event that will generally increase the stocks value, and then they sell afterwards gaining a profit.