Ten thousand watched the hype. Five hundred watched the explainer.
Josh Clark from QVG Capital spotted it long before I was willing to. YouTube videos hyping one of my ASX stock picks were pulling in 10,000 views and more. The videos explaining how the technology actually worked struggled to reach 500. Twenty hype-watchers for every one person doing the homework. That ratio told you almost everything about what happened next; nearly three years on (at the time I wrote the full piece), the company still had not landed a significant customer.
I had real money on the wrong side of that ratio. Years ago, convinced I could 'see the trends coming' and 'beat the market', I hand-picked a small ASX portfolio. It finished down 74%. My finance industry mates have never let me forget it.
The reason I keep returning to that loss is what it trained me to see inside organisations. The same ratio shows up in change programs everywhere. Plenty of enthusiasm for the announcement, the town hall, the vision deck...much less appetite for the unglamorous work of understanding the use case. Excitement about an idea outpacing clarity about who will behave differently, and why. My clients get sick of me saying it: change only happens when someone behaves differently. Until then, you are speculating with a comms plan.
The full article walks through three positions in that losing portfolio and the lesson each one funded. A neuromorphic chip maker taught me to hunt for proxies of actual customer behaviour. A one-time AI data darling showed Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma arriving right on schedule, a first mover advantage squandered while the legacy revenue felt safe. And a digital asset company reminded me that respected leadership is necessary but not sufficient when timing, markets and sentiment all get a vote.
There was a calibration lesson waiting at the end, too. I stopped picking stocks once I recognised the Dunning-Kruger effect in my own decisions (a little late, admittedly) and went back to my circle of competence. Knowing where your judgement is reliable, and where you are the confident amateur, might be the most valuable skill in the whole piece.
If you are weighing up an initiative where the enthusiasm is loud and the behavioural evidence is thin, that is the kind of pressure-testing Pragma was built for. It is my change advisory thinking in AI form; put your program's assumptions to it, or start with the FAQ to see how it works.
The portfolio is still red. The thinking it paid for is the return.
Read the full story: Seeing red to learn: what my terrible stock picks taught me about change, innovation and leadership.