noun
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a person who engages in trade; dealer; merchant
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a vessel regularly employed in foreign or coastal trade
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stock exchange a member who operates mainly on his or her own account rather than for customers' accounts
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of trader
Explanation
A trader is a person who either buys goods and resells them, like a merchant who runs a store or a person who buys and sells stocks and bonds. The original meaning of trader was "one engaged in commerce," meaning someone who makes a living buying things and selling them at a profit. Originally, traders would literally trade goods for other goods, while today most of them trade goods for money. Financial traders work solely with money, buying and selling currency, stocks, bonds, and funds.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Stocks fell, but trader Art Cashin, then a rookie, was correctly advised to buy stocks by an older colleague.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026
Jones, who is known as a commodity trader, said he expects that oil prices could rise by another $20 or $25 a barrel as the Iran conflict drags on.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 13, 2026
The Court of Appeal has quashed the conviction of Christian Bittar, a former Deutsche Bank trader who went to prison in 2018 for "manipulating" the benchmark interest rate, Euribor.
From BBC ● Oct. 9, 2026
Are you a bond trader or a yield farmer?
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2026
“One day he got me on the phone and was pissed off about a trade that had lost money,” says a Connecticut trader.
From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis
Within Vitol, Liu led a team of analysts and traders in Dubai, London and Houston.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026
Liu’s big bets were an object of fascination among oil traders and brokers, many of whom tried to mimic his moves and profit on his prescience.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026
Seoul and Tokyo again bore the brunt of the selling as traders bailed out of once-imperious chipmakers, though the selling was heavy across most of the region, tracking sharp losses on Wall Street.
From Barron's ● Oct. 15, 2026
Until the last month or so, the hot-running economy and AI financing boom were fueling ever-rising activity for both bond and stock traders.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026
In early 2003 one of them had proposed that they cease to be intellectuals and form a little group that he, the intellectual, would manage—a fact that the traders would quickly forget.
From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
