Ann: Chairman's Address to Shareholders , page-26

As you say, MDs and CEOs never put anything but a positive spin on their companies. Choose any company on the ASX, deliberately choose the most useless, failing dog of a company you can find, call the directors (often the worst companies have the easiest to reach directors) and every time you speak to one you will feel like their company is brilliant, the problems are being rapidly solved and it's an amazing opportunity at the current price.

If you're not familiar with talking to company directors, deliberately call the directors of companies you have no doubt are bad and pretend to be impressionable. Once you get a feel for the way they talk, then call one you're actually interested in.

Company directors have to convince you to buy, that's part of their job. They are usually experts at making you feel good and optimistic, and often make people feel like they have a close personal relationship or even friendship.

Keep in mind that Peter Hatfull was making people from this forum feel warm and fuzzy a couple of years ago at multiples of the current price. They came back and told us they believed all sorts of positive things which turned out to be untrue, and generally believed the company was on the edge of a huge rerating. I greatly doubt Peter Hatfull actually lied or directly mislead anyone, but like a typical scenario of a naive investor talking to a director they left feeling excited, optimistic and that they had almost secret information. When I was first posting here on AEB there were members telling me that they knew with certainty that some amazing news was going to be released within a few weeks which would blow our minds and multiply the share price many times over. Of course, the reality is that the price is now a fraction of what it was, not multiples, and the company has not delivered on its officially stated promises, let alone what naive investors have imagined they knew would happen after being psyched up.

Of course, read Hot Copper discussions about pie in the sky companies and you generally get an enthusiastic cheerleader squad waving pom poms, and anyone saying anything contrary is hated, even (especially) if their predictions are consistently correct, yet everyone loves the cheerleaders, even if they are continually wrong. I suppose people can't hate someone who has also lost money in the same way and allows them to be hopeful that they'll recover their loss. When someone does wake up and leave they don't tend to say "Gee I was wrong", they just disappear.

Never fall in love with a company, never lose the ability to have an objective perspective. Do your own research, good luck!