Have you ever turned on CNBC and watched it for a bit? If you have, I imagine you had one of two reactions. It’s either “Wow, I can’t believe something could be so boring” or “I can’t believe something could be so fascinating.” There’s no middle ground - at least from the people I have talked to. I’m one of the people that find it fascinating. My wife, well… let’s just say she’s in the other group.

Reporting on companies is a staple of almost all of their programming. If you watch it long enough you get an idea what companies do and how some are performing. It becomes a soap opera or perhaps one the first reality shows on television.

For someone fascinated with the stock market, there’s a danger here. It’s very tempting to think that you know what a company is going to do. And if you think you know what is going to happen, it’s even more tempting to buy or sell stock in an attempt to make a quick profit from it. This is what a stock trader does. Some stock traders do quite well - Timothy Sykes comes to mind. Some of them (perhaps a majority) do not to well; they end up losing most of their money.

Then there are the investors. These people buy stocks for a long time. Often they’ll buy groups of stocks via index funds. The fees to invest in these funds are low and, on average, the returns have been positive over any considerable length of time. This is widely considered a sound way to build wealth. Unfortunately, CNBC doesn’t often devote much of it’s programming time to this way thinking. It’s much more exciting to follow the twists and turns of various companies the steady march upward of index funds over a long time.

I’m finding myself caught in the middle. There’s a large part of me that wants to be a trader. It seduces me into thinking that I’m smarter than the market and can make money this way. Another part of knows better and tells me to continue to invest. It says, “Studies show that you can’t time the market. Other studies show that index funds out-perform individual stocks on average.”

I would only endorse two options for someone caught between trading and investing. The first would be to ignore the trading, shut off CNBC, and get more exercise. The other would be to set up an account with 5% or less of your net worth and start trading. Get it out of your system. If you can turn that into a pile of money, that’s great - take half off the table and start again. If you lose it, then perhaps trading isn’t right for you; stick to a buy and hold philosophy.

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Lazy Man has been a lender at Prosper since February 2006. His lending has been written up in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper. He is the author of the personal finance blog, Lazy Man and Money. He enjoys watching Boston sports while sipping diet cola.