Investment And Speculation, What’s The Difference?

Investments are also sometimes speculative investment. But investment is not the same as speculation. There are very distinct differences between them. Investment is made on financial assets or financial vehicles with the intention of earning money in the future. An earning is made when the financial assets or vehicles are sold at a higher rate than when they were initially bought. The investment becomes speculative when the investor makes the investment without adequately assessing them. The investment is speculative when the investment poses a high risk or it may even be unsafe. The risk might be so high that it may even lead to losing the actual sum invested.

Speculators expect to make a profit when the price of the asset appreciates. There are a variety of reasons why the asset appreciates. This could be due to political, social, economic or environmental factors. Rumors can also influence the price of the asset. The factors that actually led to the price fluctuation may not even be directly linked to the asset. For instance, the speculation that a political party may come to power can influence the price. Some kind of investments is essentially speculative, for instance, some commodities as oil and gold. Sometimes investors invest with the idea of short selling them. This is speculative trading. When investors buy, hold, short sell and sell commodities, bonds, stocks, currencies, real estate, collectibles, derivatives, and other valuable financial assets with the sole idea of making profits from price fluctuation rather than its real value, then these are speculative investments.

A rapidly expanding economic activity in the world is currency trading in the forex market. The selling and buying of currencies are investment as well as speculation. The extent of speculative trading is higher in the foreign exchange market. The main market players in the forex market are the governments, banks, brokers and financial institutions. The derivative Forex are determined by the prevailing exchange rate between any pair of currencies.

The way you can distinguish an investment from speculation is by the holding times. The speculator’s holding time is typically short. Of course, there is an element of speculation in all investments but it is not the main intention of investment.

A business like Forex is a hard one. It’s not a joke so you better learn everything first before doing such.

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