A second objective is speculation, which involves taking on risk from another party in order to profit from price changes. In the long soybean hedge example, the party on the other side of the trade might be a speculator hoping to profit if the price of soybeans falls. By acting as a source of liquidity to potential hedgers, speculators are a necessary part of a market.
A third objective is dealing, or market making, which means facilitating risk transfer by intermediating between hedgers and speculators and earning a spread between the two. In a sense, dealers may be considered hedgers because, upon taking on a risk from one customer, a dealer will generally hedge the risk with another customer or in underlying right or interest markets. But while dealers generally run hedged portfolios (books) of transactions, they also engage in speculation in order to provide liquidity to the market. For example, if one client wishes to establish a hedge position with a dealer but the dealer cannot immediately find an offsetting transaction, the dealer might nonetheless enter into the transaction, in effect holding a speculative (open) position on the unhedged portion of the trade.