Short answer: Consciously.

Longer answer: You might know it or you might not know it, you may admit it or you may not admit it, you may like it or you may not like it: You already are a speculator. You have to choose if you want to simply let speculation happen to you or if you want to consciously manage your wealth.

Long answer:

Many people think that speculation is evil and that they are not speculators. They just earn money with their work and leave it in their bank account. But this is obviously speculation. By storing the wealth they created in a currency, such as euro, dollar or pound, they speculate that they will keep this wealth. This is most probably not true. The issuer of the currency, the state, speculates against them by causing the currency to constantly depreciate. Many people do invest their money in financial instruments, such as real estate or stocks, and still think that they are not speculators, but "investors". How is investing different from speculating? How long do you have to hold a financial instrument such as gold or stocks for being an investor and not a speculator? Or is danger the criterion? Are you only a speculator, if you hold very dangerous "securities"?

I think "investor" is just a euphemism for "speculator". And there is no need for using euphemisms, because there is no way to avoid speculating. If you own something and do not trade it for something else, you bet (or "speculate") that that which you own doesn't decrease in value or that it even increases in value. Hence, if you own dollars, euros, pounds, gold, crypto currencies, stocks or anything else, you are a speculator.

The only real choice you have is if you want to speculate consciously or not. If you decide to speculate consciously, you decide to manage one important aspect of your life, your wealth, yourself.

If you decide to take care of your wealth yourself, you need to decide how you want to do it. In order to take an informed decision, it is, in general, a good idea to first educate oneself. In the current case, the most obvious solution seems to simply look up in an economics textbook how speculation works. The most obvious solution seems to simply learn from economics how speculation works. However, there is no such thing as "economics". There are many different denominations in economics:

Note that these are not subdisciplines of economics (like mechanics and optics are subdisciplines of physics or like morphology and syntax are subdisciplines of linguistics). These are belief systems or ideologies. That means that you have to decide in which of these theories you want to believe.

Maybe economics as such (or the economic ideologies as such) does not actually help you learn how to speculate? Maybe you should learn that from videos, tutorials or books? If you search with "investment" or "speculation", you will be overwhelmed with the number of different approaches you will find.

So, you cannot simply look up how speculation works. You will get too many different answers.

Does that mean that you have to invent everything yourself? Of course not. If you can learn from others, do so. But that does not prevent you from having to think. If you blindly follow a school, a known great trader, a guru, you do not really act yourself. The only way to do things oneself is to try to understand a given situation oneself and then to consciously take a decision.

At Algocrowd we are not advising you to believe us. It is always a bad idea, to simply believe something. We are asking you to check if you think our way of finding trading algorithms makes sense. And we are asking you to experiment with the found trading algorithms yourself. Do not use anything for trading that you do not understand yourself.

A few general things about trading, a.k.a investing, a.k.a speculating can be said. You either speculate rather actively or rather passively. If you speculate passively, you need a lot of time. Ways of speculating rather passively are:

• Borrow a lot of money, buy real estate and speculate that you will be able to pay the money back.
• "Buy and hold": "Go long" on stocks, gold, commodities, crypto, ... and wait.

To speculate in a rather active way means to often buy and sell instruments. You can even sell instruments that you do not actually own. This is called "going short". One way to do this is to use contracts for difference.

You also have to decide if you rather want to speculate manually or if you want to automate your speculations. Today, there are ways to automate rather passive as well as rather active ways of speculating. The algorithms found by Algocrowd are a way of automating an active way of speculating.

Whatever you do: Take your own decisions. By all means, learn from others. And, by all means, do not simply believe others. Think for yourself.