"Investors are..."

Everytime I check the finance news, there is always some headline or first sentence that begins with "Investors are expected to lift the market higher after talks in Europe..." or "investors will be pulling the market down after US job data was..."

But are they mis-using the term 'investor'? When I think of the word 'investor', I think about mom and pa and generally people who invest for the long term, people who think "I'll put my money in now, and hopefully it'll go up in 5 years". But they're not the people to think "omg, US job data is positive, I'm back in baby!" or "France's bond yield was too high, I'm out". I think of people who think carefully before acting, rather than acting on every tidbit of news.

I think market movement is largely due to traders and big companies like superannuation funds. I do not consider them 'investors'. They are the ones reacting to daily news (noise).

So would it be more accurate if headlines replaced 'investors' with 'traders' or 'large company investors'?

I think it would be best if they used terminology like, "our analysis predict markets will respond by... / in such a way...".

News are very deceiving in many ways.

Methinks you're applying too narrow a meaning to the word "investor". The distinctions you suggest are often controversial, rarely important, and hardly ever of anything but semantic interest to an academic.

In everyday use, the term is used increasingly to describe any person - be they natural, corporate, or legally ficticious - who exchanges cash for an asset and expects the asset to increase in value. After some indeterminate time, they swap the asset back into cash
Some "investments" stay longer in the asset phase, others not so long. It depends on the investor's expectation and how quickly an asset has done its job of increasing its value.
I have stayed invested in some assets for years; others I have sold after a couple of minutes.
Does one make me an investor? The other a trader? I'm still the same person and couldn't care less what label is pinned on what I do.

Sure, it would be more truthful if those morning spruikers and editors were saying/ writing something like: "Our guess is as good as yours; we think the ASX 200 will gain about 1% today because an official from {Bundesbank/ Fed/ Goldman-Sachs...} said things weren't as bad as they looked yesterday. The {DAX/ FTSE/ Dow...} rose, which usually means our market will rise as well."

Now THAT would be understandable: reporting who said what, and explaining the logic behind a simple conclusion. Which is precisely why no self-respecting editor would publish anything that way. Financial matters must be mysterious, and the talking heads/ writers make themselves look better if they're on first-name basis with those elusive and all-knowing VIP "Investors".

pixel said:

Financial matters must be mysterious, and the talking heads/ writers make themselves look better if they're on first-name basis with those elusive and all-knowing VIP "Investors".

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Indeed.

The term "investors" has become just another catch-all "label" for the world's mass media to play with. The mass media love nothing better than catchy, one word (preferably one syllable) labels.

It's just too hard for them to spell out in detail precisely who said what and why and on behalf of whom with regard to that other catch-all term "finance".

Ahhh, don't you just love today's much simpler world, where everything has simple labels?

LOL...

Yeh just seems like another thread seeking a definition of which everyone will have a different opinion.

Dictionary definition of investor is:

to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.

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So that means anyone putting money in the market is by definition an investor.

The only type of investor that is important to a company is the one that they need to put additional funds in during a capital raising. The investors that are already invested suddenly have no importance (not that they ever did).