Obviously the success of one stock tells you nothing about the...

Obviously the success of one stock tells you nothing about the potential success of another. So, yes, I'd be comparing an apple with a grape if my point was to compare stocks. Only, I'm not comparing stocks. I'm comparing investors in stocks. They are fundamentally the same from one stock to another.

The point of the comparison is we humans are not very logical. We mistake today's market valuation of a company as being representative of its future potential. Now, that's not an entirely silly conclusion. The share price is basically the "wisdom of the crowd" estimate of a company's valuation. As statistician Francis Galton showed in 1906 by having a large number of people estimate the weight of a bull, this can be pretty accurate. For established stocks, this seems to work and you are unlikely to beat the index picking stocks. If a big company like NAB is going down, there's probably a good reason - even if you can't see what that reason might be. In the spec stock space this kind of breaks down, though. There are too many unknowns and too much volatility to consider share price to be very well-correlated with intrinsic value. If you want to invest in specs you should probably either use a TA approach and invest entirely by the stock performance with no consideration of fundamentals or follow that age-old advice, DYOR, and not pay too much attention to SP movements that aren't explained by actual news.

I was giving pretty much the same warning, just in the other direction, over in 4DS last year when the SP was going up on no news. As expected, reality caught up with people. The price crashed far more spectacularly in just a matter of hours than I had even anticipated it could.

As a side note, consolidation is news and it did precipitate a drop in share price that many people (not including me) did predict. But it isn't the kind of news that means a lot long-term. The downward effect on share price after consolidation can also be understood easily enough due to flaws in human reasoning, and really has nothing much to do with the long-term future of the company.