Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Are my purchases of stock, mutual funds, ETF's, and commodities investing, or speculation?
I'd argue the two words ought to (in that I see this as a helpful distinction) describe different activities:   "Investing":  spending one's money in order to own something of value.  This could be equipment (widgets, as you wrote), shares in a company, antiques, land, etc.  It is fundamentally an act of buying. "Speculating":  a mental process in which one attempts to ascertain the future value of some good.  Speculation is fundamentally an act of attempted predicting.   Under this set of definitions, one can invest without speculating (CDs...no need for prediction) and speculate without investing (virtual investing).  In reality, though, the two often go together.  The sorts of investments you describe are speculative, that is, they are done with some prediction in mind of future value.   The degree of "speculativeness", then, has to be related to the nature of the attempted predictions.  I've often seen that people say that the "most speculative" investments (in my use above, those in which the attempted prediction is most chaotic) have these sorts of properties: And there are probably other ideas that can be included. Corrections/clarifications welcome! P.S. It occurs to me that, actually, maybe High Frequency Trading isn't speculative at all, in that those with the fastest computers and closest to Wall Street can actually guarantee many small returns per hour due to the nature of how it works.  I don't know enough about the mechanics of it to be sure, though.