Well it all depends on the experience of the trader, I believe. At first, we all just speculate, but then, when we get experience, we begin to make transactions with the mind and it is not like speculation. These are already considered trading decisions.
The trader must speculate first before he trades because he speculates to profit from price fluctuations. if only everyone's experience can do that, but if done both will definitely make it easier to make a profit even if it's small.
They will do speculation to increase their capacity to create a prediction about the market movement. That means traders must do a lot of speculation to get profit from the market. but that's not easy as you said when it comes to the manipulation market and traders must be careful with it. A lot of traders have thought if they have created the best prediction but at the end of the story and they are being failed to get profit and ended in loss. I have seen those cases so many times.