There are many different ways to speculate in trading. They can be due to fundamental reasons such as our example above on the subprime crisis. More often than not, though, it is due to technical reasons (using technical analysis). In the world of trading, there is a tremendously popular technique called “technical analysis” which uses different types of analysis on the charts (primarily) to determine the direction of where the market is heading. Little to no analysis is done on the fundamentals of a company before taking such trades off technical analysis. Understand some of the key technical indicators used in technical analysis to speculate using live charts. Speculative trading also tends to be more short-term in nature - hence the reason why analysing years worth of financial data of an asset is not going to be very useful for it. Traders tend to have a short term bias - believing that the market is either going to head up/down over a short period of time and then take a trade on it.