The type of speculation just analyzed serves to smooth the transitions of the market, enabling it to anticipate conditions to come, in effect connecting the present to the future. Other forms of speculation can be analyzed using a similar approach. Some speculators serve to enhance the connectedness of the market across space rather than time, as when speculators buy in one geographical area in order to sell in another. More generally, speculators may realize a profit by providing cohesion to any given market.

Speculators, like most people, tend to see the world in terms of their own area of specialization. Ironically, their specialized viewpoint sometimes makes it difficult for speculators themselves to appreciate the functions of the market as a whole. Having trained themselves to look for price discrepancies, which lead to profit opportunities, they tend to be attuned to such discrepancies. Consequently, they have a special awareness of the market's occasional imperfections. (Of course, no complex human institution will ever be perfect.) In order to grasp the market as a whole, however, the speculator needs to look at it from a wider perspective. Such an individual must understand that he or she is part of that market, along with all others who share that specialty (). The actions of such men and women, who realize earnings by discovering discrepancies in the marketplace, have the aggregate effect of eliminating such discrepancies, at least insofar as they can be discovered by human beings of limited knowledge.