Is capital market investment speculation?

stock market consists of most intelligent people in the world. There are acute value investors who are willing to wait for opportunities, schrewd stock traders to have the insight where the trend is heading to, and superb stock speculators who try to outsmart them all by 'creating the events through statistics'. so, stock market is not totally made for speculation, even there are speculating sentiment inside. if you know how the play game, you'll discover how to follow their game at your advantage.

It's only speculation if you dont know what you are doing. If you have an MBA and work on wall street, it's called "investing" or "trading".

Speculation is any decision based on expectation.
Something all human beings do all the time in all
fields of activities.

A specific case is financial speculation, a bet that
* you will make a gain by selling something (capital
assets in your example: stocks, bonds...) at a higher
price than you bought it,
* by accepting in parallel the risk of a loss in case you
will have to sell it for less.

Therefore any investment is in some way speculative
although the "speculation" word is more often used
for:
* very risky investment but with very high potential
return, by using for example highly leveraged instruments
(futures, options...)
* frequent short term trading

What differs here are the "degree of risk" and the "time
horizon" of the operation(s).
.