Excellent article -- thanks for sharing. A good reminder to ignore hype, focus on fundamentals and always have an eye to value.

And to also keep a close eye on management, their competence, their trustworthiness, and to hold them to account - in that they do what they say they are going to do. The reality is that most people will do what is in their own best interests most of the time, and that includes the management teams of small microcap companies listed on the ASX. Those that have significant shareholdings in the companies they run are more likely to act in the best interests of ordinary shareholders - because their interests are more aligned with ours - but that's not guaranteed either. Martin makes an excellent point there about how these guys "earn" or are "given" their shares. If a founder builds up a company from scratch and earns his shares, he is much more likely to try to avoid share price plunges than someone who is given their shares for very little effort on their part - such as part of an IPO deal. Hype often serves as a good red flag, but management's actions are worth watching also. Additionally, I like the point about presentations that focus on mega-trends (such as cloud computing) that the company doing the presentation has only a very tiny exposure to - if any. That probably would be classified as hype, but it's unfortunately very common. I find this especially problematic in biotech companies where we may tend to take a company management at their word when they describe their journey, their position within that journey, their likely destination, the size of the opportunity, and how long it will probably take to get there. They are almost always wrong, on multiple fronts, and because most of us don't have the requisite training to fully understand everything within their presentations (such as the science of their IP, or the specifics of the way that regulatory bodies such as the FDA and the BSI tend to operate), we take these presentations at their word, in lieu of credible alternative information. It probably pays to be more sceptical - to believe very little of what you hear or read - unless you can back it up with credible supporting evidence from alternative sources.