a trader is someone who buys and sells financial instruments such as stocks, bonds and derivatives. A broker who simply fills buy or sell orders is not a trader, as they are merely executing instructions given to them. Traders are either professionals working in a financial institution or a corporation, or individual investors, or day traders. They buy and sell financial instruments traded in the stock markets, derivatives markets and commodity markets, comprising the stock exchanges, derivatives exchanges and the commodities exchanges. A merchant is a businessman who trades in commodities that he didn't produce himself, in order to earn a profit. Merchants can be of two types: 1.A wholesale merchant operates in the chain between producer and retail merchant. Some wholesale merchants only organize the movement of goods rather than move the goods themselves. 2.A retail merchant or retailer, sells commodities to consumers (including businesses). A shop owner is a retail merchant. A merchant class characterizes many pre-modern societies. Its status can range from high (the members even eventually achieving titles such as that of merchant prince or nabob) to low, as in Chinese culture, owing to the presumed distastefulness of profiting from "mere" trade rather than from labor or the labor of others as in agriculture and craftsmanship. cowboy...

here's what I got: a TRADER is an investor who holds stocks and securities for a short period of time (a few minutes, hours or days). The goal is to profit from short-term gains in the market. The stock selection is generally based on technical analysis or charting which relate only to the stock price rather than a fundamental evaluation of the company as a business. a MERCHANT is an individual whose occupation is to buy items at wholesale prices and sell them at retail prices. another significant difference is that, a MERCHANT has many outlets for the sales of his products, while a TRADER is confined to a particular town or city for the sale of his wares/commodities. :)

A trader is a person who buys and sells things (goods and services) as a job. There are, for example, traders who sell things on the street (we call them street traders). There are also market traders who sell things in a market. However, a merchant is a person who buys and sells goods in large quantities, especially one who imports and exports goods.