Boy, has this come the full circle for me...I was a broker and manager of my own franchise back in the 80's, and I found a small company based in Calgary that had really impressive fundamentals. I went to Calgary, did my DD, and started buying. My brokers also started buying, and eventually we (and of course our clients), owned over 60% of the float. We figured that the stock was in good hands, and good growth would take it away from us (just like we all want with these JPM stocks now). Little did I know that the company was in the process of doing a secondary offering, and the brokerage firm up there was "front-running" the deal, selling short and covering with the cheap stock from the offering. Overnight the stock plunged from around $2.00 to $.30, and of course many of our clients seeing this price decline sold their positions, making the market makers in Vancouver and Calgary a lot of green. This episode put me out of business, and soured me on the stock market in general for years. My experience is that frequently the companies are in cahoots with the Banks, and place the PP into know hands, ready to deliver to the banks when asked. I heard Peter Grandich interviewed on Gold Seek Radio over the weekend, where he confirmed that many of these small companies in Canada really are merely playing at the public offering world only to move paper. And as JP and Eric King said, the companies themselves need to get out of the paper printing business and do these offerings to really grow their deals. Maybe a good thing to look into as owners of ECU is to demand that they seek funding from US banks. I don't know the answer, but I'm sure fed up with this racket! I will help in anyway I can to aid in cleaning this up.