Speculate why it is helpful to classify matter

Speculating tends to be synonymous with trading because it is more focused on shorter-term moves in the market. You would speculate because you think an event is going to impact a particular asset in the near term. Speculators often use financial derivatives, such as options contracts, futures contracts, and other synthetic investments rather than buying and holding specific securities.

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Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Investing Investing Essentials. Investing vs. Speculating: An Overview Investors and traders take on calculated risk as they attempt to profit from transactions they make in the markets.

Key Takeaways The main difference between speculating and investing is the amount of risk involved. Investors try to generate a satisfactory return on their capital by taking on an average or below-average amount of risk. Speculators are seeking to make abnormally high returns from bets that can go one way or the other.

Speculative traders often utilize futures, options, and short selling trading strategies. Article Sources. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work. These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts.

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Investopedia does not include all offers available in the marketplace. Related Articles. A favorite playground of researchers is the toric code, a phase theoretically constructed by the condensed matter theorist Alexei Kitaev of the California Institute of Technology in and demonstrated in experiments over the past decade. The toric code can live on a plane and still maintain the multiple ground states of a torus.

Spin liquids can also enter other phases, in which spins, instead of forming closed loops, sprout branching networks of strings. Only gapped quantum phases have well-defined excitations in the form of particles. Gapless phases are like swirling matter miasmas or quantum soups and remain largely unknown territory in the landscape of phases.

For a 1-D chain of bosons — particles like photons that have integer values of quantum spin, which means they return to their initial quantum states after swapping positions — there is only one gapped topological phase. Michael Kosterlitz, won the Nobel Prize for decades of work on topological phases, the spin chain gives rise to half-spin particles on both ends.

Two gapped topological phases exist for chains of fermions — particles like electrons and quarks that have half-integer values of spin, meaning their states become negative when they switch positions.

The topological order in all these 1-D chains stems not from long-range quantum entanglement, but from local symmetries acting between neighboring particles. Two-dimensional phases are more plentiful and more interesting.

In the last few years, researchers have shown that these entanglement patterns correspond to topological structures called tensor categories, which enumerate the different ways that objects can possibly fuse and braid around one another. Gapless quantum phases represent another kingdom of possibilities to explore, but these impenetrable fogs of matter resist most theoretical methods.

Gapless phases present the main barrier in the quest to understand high-temperature superconductivity, for instance. Some researchers try to use mathematical dualities to convert the quantum-soup picture into an equivalent particle description in one higher dimension.

Even more enthusiastic exploration is happening in 3-D. The very wildest of the 3-D phases appeared seven years ago. For this, Haah had to turn to 3-D matter. Because strings grow uncontrollably and wrap around things, experts say there cannot be good quantum memories in 2-D. The investor does not have enough capital to diversify, so instead, they decide to hedge their position by buying options. The investor can purchase one put option on their shares, which gives them the right to sell the stock for a specific locked-in price usually, the current one in the future, paying a small premium for the option.

If XYZ misses its earnings estimates and its share prices fall, the investor will lose money on their long position the stocks they actually own but will make money on the put option, which becomes more valuable as the price of the underlying stock decreases. If calculated correctly, the two will roughly balance out, so the investor won't be left with too much of a net loss. Hedging is a form of investment insurance. To hedge against investment risk means strategically using financial instruments or market strategies to offset the risk of any adverse price movements.

Investors hedge one investment by making a trade in another, or making the opposite move in the same investment—like going short on a stock they own, in case the price drops. Let's say you own stock in the Crazy Chocolate Company their truffles are to die for.

You've been hearing how sugar cane crops have been adversely affected by climate change, causing shortages that will make sugar prices soar. This will affect CCC's operations, as they buy a lot of sugar to make their candy, and you fear the stock's going to suffer.

To protect yourself, you hedge by buying a put option on CCC. This option gives you the right to sell the CCC stock at its current price by a certain date in the future. If the stock rises or stays the same, you don't have to do anything. But if the stock falls, you can exercise the option and sell the stock—for the older, higher price you locked in with the option.

So this will mitigate the hit you took on the shares dropping. As an investor, you naturally buy stocks you think will appreciate. But a put option is essentially a bet that share prices will fall. By hedging and buying this option, you were in a sense working against yourself—but you were also covering yourself, and shielding against an overall loss in your investments. Hedging, speculation, and arbitrage all are fairly sophisticated, and usually short-term, investment strategies.

Speculation is a trading strategy that often involves very quick-paced buying and selling. It's based on hunches, educated guesses, or theories on price moves—as opposed to fundamentals—about the financial asset or investment.

As such, the timing of entry and exit is crucial. Designed to achieve fast profits, speculation involves a significant amount of risk. Hedging is investing with the intention of reducing the risk of adverse price movements in an asset. A hedge consists of taking an offsetting or opposite position in a security that is the same as, or related to, the one the investor already has.

It's a defensive move, designed to limit loss. Arbitrage is a form of hedging. It also involves making seemingly contradictory investment moves—specifically the simultaneous buying and selling of an asset or equivalent assets , often in different markets or exchanges, in order to profit from small variations in price.

Primarily used by large, institutional investors and hedge funds, arbitrage involves low risk, if executed carefully and precisely. Hedging and derivatives are actually two different animals. Dalton first proposed part of his atomic theory in and later refined these concepts in his classic paper A New System of Chemical Philosophy which you can access through a link under the Resources tab.

Dalton's theory had four main concepts: All matter is composed of indivisible particles called atoms. Bernoulli, Dalton, and others pictured atoms as tiny billiard-ball-like particles in various states of motion. While this concept is useful to help us understand atoms, it is not correct as we will see in later modules on atomic theory linked to at the bottom of this module. All atoms of a given element are identical; atoms of different elements have different properties.

Dalton's theory suggested that every single atom of an element such as oxygen is identical to every other oxygen atom; furthermore, atoms of different elements, such as oxygen and mercury, are different from each other.

Dalton characterized elements according to their atomic weight ; however, when isotopes of elements were discovered in the late s, this concept changed.

Chemical reactions involve the combination of atoms, not the destruction of atoms. Atoms are indestructible and unchangeable, so compounds , such as water and mercury calx, are formed when one atom chemically combines with other atoms.

This was an extremely advanced concept for its time; while Dalton's theory implied that atoms bonded together, it would be more than years before scientists began to explain the concept of chemical bonding.

When elements react to form compounds, they react in defined, whole-number ratios. The experiments that Dalton and others performed showed that reactions are not random events; they proceed according to precise and well-defined formulas. This important concept in chemistry is discussed in more detail below. Some of the details of Dalton's atomic theory require more explanation.

Elements: As early as , Robert Boyle recognized that the Greek definition of element earth, fire, air, and water was not correct. Boyle proposed a new definition of an element as a fundamental substance, and we now define elements as fundamental substances that cannot be broken down further by chemical means. Elements are the building blocks of the universe. They are pure substances that form the basis of all of the materials around us.

Some elements can be seen in pure form, such as mercury in a thermometer; some we see mainly in chemical combination with others, such as oxygen and hydrogen in water. We now know of approximately different elements.

Each of the elements is given a name and a one- or two-letter abbreviation. Often this abbreviation is simply the first letter of the element; for example, hydrogen is abbreviated as H, and oxygen as O. Sometimes an element is given a two-letter abbreviation; for example, helium is He. When writing the abbreviation for an element, the first letter is always capitalized and the second letter if there is one is always lowercase. Atoms: A single unit of an element is called an atom.

The atom is the most basic unit of matter , which makes up everything in the world around us. Each atom retains all of the chemical and physical properties of its parent element. At the end of the nineteenth century, scientists would show that atoms were actually made up of smaller, "subatomic" pieces, which smashed the billiard-ball concept of the atom see our Atomic Theory I: The Early Days module. Compounds: Most of the materials we come into contact with are compounds, substances formed by the chemical combination of two or more atoms of the elements.