  This paper presents an agent based model of an electronic market with two
types of trading agents. One type follows a mean reverting strategy and the
other, the speculative trader, tracks the maximum realised return over recent
trades. The speculators have a distribution of returns concentrated on negative
returns, with a small fraction making profits. The market experiences an
increased volatility and prices that greatly depart from the fundamental value
of the asset. Our research provides synthetic datasets of the order book to
study its dynamics under different levels of speculation
