RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:This is FANTASTIC for our Platreef projectStar Searcher,
If you look at the overall statistics it all sounds plausible. Maybe a fund got p'd off, threw up their hands, and hit the sell button, triggering a general rout. I don't buy it. If you were watching moment by moment trading action, especially around the close each day, every single uptick was followed by an instantaneous down tick. Never the other way round. That's not some fund unloading a position. It's someone consciously trying their best to sell at the lowest possible price. And this was going on a lot longer than 13 days. It was continuous from December right up through last Friday, when the trend reversed. I didn't say anything in December, because it could have been tax loss selling. But when I saw this continuing on January 2, it was proof positive that a determined short effort was underway. And I said as much at the time. None of this shows up in the bimonthly short report, where everything comes up sunshine and flowers. For the end of January it only shows 1.6% of shares outstanding, a nominally modest position. There was an increase, but not that significant. Nothing that could account for the relentless selling which has been going on for 2.5 months. Yet who sells for the lowest possible price? Only a short would trade like that.
And then there is Venture Trader, who not only claimed the market was rigged, but announced a short position at just over $4, and said the stock would trade down between $2.50 and $2.75. This was just prior to the big plunge.I laughed at the time. It seemed absurd that a company with a project portfolio like IVN, could be reduced to a market cap of $2.16 billion CAD. Well VT was right on the money. He provided a real clinic on how to trade manipulative venture markets.
My only question is not if trading action was manipulated, but to what end? If it was to stampede investors into capitulation, then that strategy failed. Only 8.8% of the available float traded between Jan 31, the day the mining law was announced, and last Friday, the day of reversal up. And many, if not most, of those trades would have been active traders slicing pennies, running trades across multiple accounts and through programs. If the objective was simply to crash the price for whatever reason, sending IVN to the discount bin, then they were more successful.