by
Gurpartap Singh , Band S2 as a Cashier cum Accountant , Fabindia Overseas Pvt Ltd
Buy side versus sell side: traders at a hedge fund or prop firm taking on risk to maximize reward versus traders at an investment bank that are trying to maximize flow by matching bids and offers.
Systematic versus discretionary: traders who write computer code for strategies that can be backtested versus traders who research particular theses to trade on that are not based on a model or cannot be backtested (or use their intuition).
Role within the "stack" of trading: portfolio manager, who is responsible for the risk taking and strategy, assistant trader, or execution trader. Sometimes these are all the same person, but in larger organizations, the position "Trader" can refer to the most junior of the roles, whereas the actual portfolio manager may be called something like "Senior Managing Director" so there is confusion about that too.
