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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Distortions Of Investment Market By Speculative Investment

Investments are also made on the basis of speculation. Investments are called speculative investment when the investor does not analyze and assess the financial asset before investment is made. Often investors are not interested in long term investment but on short term change in price. The fluctuation of prices over a short term is the primary factor in speculative investment. These short term fluctuations may not actually reflect the real value of the asset. Banking on these fluctuations is both risky and distorts the real nature of the asset.

The speculative investment may be beneficial or harmful. The speculator typically buys a produce or an asset when it is in short supply or when the demand is high so that the increased short supply drives up the price. When the price is high, the produce or asset will last longer. But the higher price will keep away a section of the consumer from buying. Speculative buying also is likely to result in hoarding of the produce, further leading to an artificially created short supply fueling the prices even higher. At the same time a higher price could also promote increased production and possibly import if needed.

Speculative buying and selling influences the price of the asset. Increased buying leads to higher price. The price falls with speculative selling. The price may even decline below its real value when the selling is more and in a short time. Speculative buying could drive up the price. When an even higher increase in price is anticipated, this fuels speculative buying driving up its price very high. This could follow with a loss of confidence leading to panic sales making the price crash to the bottom. This becomes a bubble that burst. A major economic activity is the foreign exchange market. Speculative investment is high in this market. There are many ways to understand how the market operates. One way is to learn from the many publications some of which are the London Forex Rush, Forex Trading Made E-Z, Learn Forex Live, System and Forex Breakout strategy.

Increased speculation in the market leads to short-term volatility leading to unstable prices. In recent times, there has been a series of economic bubble bursts that goes beyond the specific asset to affect the whole investment market. This has led to intense debate on the need to regulate speculative investment and trading. A number of measures have been suggested to regulate speculative trading. One such measure is to ban speculative trading in certain commodities as oil blaming hedge funds in the manipulation of oil prices. Another suggestion is to levy a penalty in the form of tax on short-term speculation in currencies of 1 percent or lesser. This tax is named Tobin Tax after James Tobin, an economist.

The Forex business is a difficult endeavor. Thus, a person should always exert the best of his efforts so he will succeed at all his endeavors.

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