The investor is that one who buys stocks at a certain price and holds them for a long time in attempt to create wealth from a business growth. Investors are so called long term players in the stock market. They keep their stocks for a very long time and collect dividend payouts at the end of every year. In case they buy bonds, they wait until the bonds mature.
Investor's objective always stays fixed to long-term view. Investor will carefully analyze a certain company he/she is interested in, realize how much it's worth, and will buy stocks only after its value is at substantial discount to its intrinsic value. Smart investor will at all times enter the market based solely on factual data and will not allow emotions to get involved.
To be more technical, investor wants to own acquisitions based on the presumption that if companies produce returns in addition to inflation over period of time, than by owning these assets of companies, he/she will get a hold of these returns.
In the market both investors and speculators affect stock prices. The speculators constantly drive prices to extremes, while investors try to even out wild fluctuations, so in the long run, prices of a certain stock simply reflects the underlying value of a company.
If there would only be investors all trying to gain profits by holding stocks of a companies for a long time, the market as a whole would act far more reasonably than it does in reality. Stocks would be bought and sold based solely on the value of the company, while wild fluctuations, which are the result of constant buying and selling of speculators, would occur far less frequently.
Without speculators, investors would simply buy stock every time company appeared to be undervalued, which would drive price to more rational levels. As soon as the company became overpriced, it would be sold immediately. Speculators create volatility, the value, investors love.
This leads to stocks becoming greatly overvalued when interest in people's eyes are high, and greatly undervalued when everything goes out of vogue. All this game create a lot of opportunities for us to choose those companies that are currently selling for far less than they are actually worth.
Because of that, investors tend believe that even though in the short run stock prices may greatly depart from the actual value of the company, in the long term the fundamentals are that what truly matter. There is a famous quote, which nicely describes the above: "In the short run market is similar to a voting machine, while in the long run it is more like a weighing machine."
It doesn't matter whether you prefer the game of speculators or a smart investing as an investor, you should undergo fundamental as well technical analysis of the business you intend to invest in. If you follow what other people in their arrogance and ignorance have to say without any judgment on your own you are well on the road to lose all of your investment.