Of course investing in speccies will generally be risky, but...

Of course investing in speccies will generally be risky, but (very rarely) it takes a while for the market to catch on and you can get an easy bargain if you look at the right place at the right time. Very often speccies are exactly that, you're taking a risk and it's almost impossible to know which way it will go.

But also very commonly there are companies which with a little research you can identify as guaranteed duds. A risk may or may not go well, but a guaranteed dud will go badly. Guaranteed failures are relatively common, and exist because if enough people believe in them the people running them continue to make money, so they drag things out for as long as possible. It's easy to buy into these companies. When smart investors see them they walk away. It's much more difficult to get good value, because when smart investors see a company at good value they'll buy until it's up there.

Investing in duds and calling them speccies is pretty common.

Having said that, it's possible to make money from duds. One of my biggest profits in my first few months of trading came from a completely fraudulent company. At firstly I was sucked in (naively believing that the claims must be true because otherwise they'd be breaking the law and the regulators would do something! ). I bought in and quickly realised I'd been conned. I had already put a sell order in, and was surprised when during my next break at work I had a look and my shares had sold far higher than my ordered price. The company had made an even bigger claim. Over the next few minutes the price tumbled, over the next couple of years I watched it gradually sink to nothing, occasionally popped in to see people on the forums singing their praises and saying the directors' previous failures were irrelevant etc. Eventually it became clear they never had any delusion about anything working, the evidence was clear, they skipped the country to avoid the law, and some on the forum still had faith, hoping they'd come back, sort it out, relist the company and get the miracle products (mainly human health products in the end, though it was agricultural stuff when I bought in) to market. Sort of a coincidence come to think of it. Once fooled some people are impossible to unfool!

You make your own decision, of course.