Quote from cabletrader:
I agree with you, price often doesn't reflect fundamentals but take oil for example. If you were making money from speculating in oil (and a lot of people made a lot of money) would you be against extreme speculation so much? No, you'd probably be hoping to see oil at $200! Sure it's probably not morally acceptable to gain at other's expense but since when did traders have any morals when it comes to trading, generally they'll buy and sell anything if there's a buck in it.
Genuine speculation stops prices going to extremes as traders decide the move is over done and pile in on the opposite side. When there was no exchange commodities were subject to much greater price swings.
The problems happen when someone tries to corner a market or in the case of oil when it looks suspicious because huge deals are done anonymously offshore trading on the Brent exchange.
Traders shouldn't give traders a bad name

When a market crashes and the public are scared senseless it's traders that step up to the plate and risk their cash to create the dawn of optimism.