There are several different meanings of investment, but the main feature is that investment refers to long-term commitment, as opposed to trading or speculating, which are short-term.

Some more common meanings:

• Investment is the activity of giving money or other resources to receive something useful or desired.

  The simplest type of this meaning of investments is the spending money for the education or career.

  • People can invest money to their education or increasing knowledge by visiting courses, buying books, etc.

    Also, people can invest other resources, such as time (even all life), in their education by reading, learning, asking, finding answers, etc.

  • Some people invest a lot of time to their career. For example, some positions in military require long service, e.g. next position can be just after 5 or even 10 years on the previous position. In other words, some positions require experience of several years. So, people should invest not just money, but several years of their life to receive some position.
• Investment is the amount of money that were spent or planned to be spend for some industry, company or even person with expectation of receiving earnings, dividends or some bonuses, either material or non-material.

  For example:

  • Individuals or organizations can invest to different industries by buying securities.
  • Investors can invest to the statutory fund of some company for their own reasons, such as:
    • to receive rights to control the activities of this company,
    • to sell their part of the company in future to receive income,
    • just to save their capital.

Other very popular type of investment is buying a real estate property. A lot of people think that buying something expensive is an investment.

Investing refers to long-term commitment, as opposed to trading or speculating, which are short-term and often deal with heavy turnover and, consequently, a higher amount of risk.

See also investment portfolio.