Of course there is dodgy crap that goes on on stock exchanges....

Of course there is dodgy crap that goes on on stock exchanges.

The issue I have is the 'throw arms up in air and blame manipulation, hedge funds and scary ghosts' for AIS in particular when it's very obvious what happened to cause the current share price to be where it is (bad management decisions/mine purchases, poor hedging, rising interest rates, crashing copper prices, global economic slowdown, terrible loan financing terms, etc etc). It's not like it's some kind of mystery or evil entity with this stock.

And there are also plenty of success stories on the market that grew from minnows, we just don't think of them that way because they're mature companies by this point. More recent examples would be things like PLS, APT etc.

Yes plenty of listed companies don't succeed (I think it's something like 50% fail within the first 10 years of listing), that's why you build a diversified portfolio, or just stick to index funds instead.