Hi Bluegold!

Any trade can be hidden under 'anonymous' and it could be two unrelated parties that route their trading that way, so it is not necessarily a cross. It is my understanding that the house positions must be cleared through the origin trading house after 2 weeks. For example, if CC is dumping paper under 'anonymous' today, within a couple weeks the net trades would appear under the house positions for CC.

I do think that someone is likely front-running a legitimate order execution, and that accounts for the large discount on days like today. If you know that Investor 'A' wants to sell 100,000 shares for example, then the broker could also execute a short order at the same time as the customer order is being processed. Naturally that selling will take out bid support and ECU would see a temporary selloff as other investors are selling, stop losses get hit, etc. Then the broker would put in a buy order to cover the short the next day and it would never show up in reported short postions for the stock. Even if the trading was executed under 'anonymous' it would eventually show as net buys and sells under the brokers trading house in a few weeks, but by then the raid is ancient history.

I am simply outlining a possible scenario above. I do not know who is behind the selling, or if anything unsavory is going on. I am not under the assumption that everything is on the up and up with the trading activity but I cannot prove anything illegal so I just try to maintain faith in the long term direction for ECU, and take advantage of short term price weakness. I added a few thousand shares today @ 74 cents and fully expect to see ECU trending back towards a buck soon enough.

cheers!

mike