This invention prevents illegal memory address faults on speculative data loads. Circular addressing of the address pointer limits memory access to a range of addresses including all addresses used by the address pointer and not including any invalid addresses. The invention uses circular addressing hardware, if available on the data processor. If not available, this invention simulates circular addressing. This invention permits loads to be issued earlier than if predication were used and allows already predicated loads to be speculated without the overhead of a compound predicate. This invention can be used on processors without hardware supporting speculation.