Ann: Trading Halt, page-216

" It’s not a game "

It is absolutely a game, money is just the means of keeping score. You really need to do some research on a large number of stocks histories, or just get some chart scanning software with a good historical database and look through the history of these sort of companies, they get pumped to the moon and then go all the way back down in >99% of cases, the number of these dreams that actually succeed is tiny. Those of us who've been around for many years have seen this game played out over and over again, it's been this way forever too, 100 years ago Livermore wrote “Wall Street never changes. The pockets change, the stocks change, but Wall Street never changes because human nature never changes.”

A good piece of advice I read years ago from an old HC poster went along the lines of "if you expect all of these stocks to end up back at zero you'll be right a lot more than wrong"(zero being effective zero i.e after consolidations etc)