The PM stocks were hit far harder than the market overall. I agree there are reasons why the market was under pressure on Monday, but the severity of the selling in the PM sector is suspicious. Some would argue that the PM sector stocks have massive gains and therefore would the stocks investors choose first when profit taking to raise money for other things. Fine. But a simple review of the PM juniors year to date suggests that most of these stocks are flat or down from where they started the year and have not made any special move higher. Many other sectors have seen sharp rises and would have been more logical candidates for retail investors to sell.

My personal opinion is that the PM stocks sold off on monday because of blatant intervention. The S&P downgrade of US debt outlook was leaked to the administration on friday. Big surprise, on friday we saw the PM sector selling off even with the overall markets holding strong and the metals were well into the green. Its a documented fact that the metals are always taken lower on any bearish overall economic data, regardless of whether that may be bullish for gold and silver. This is a manufactured and manipulated response created by carpet bombing futures into the market. If one has advance notice of a major pending news item like a ratings outlook downgrade, and we know they did, and we also know that the PTTB will respond by crushing the metals, which they did, it is not a big stretch to understand the mining juniors were hammered on 'insider trading' of that event starting friday.

And we have survived many such interventions along the way. The metals and the mining stocks recover and those who buy the dips have been rewarded. None of this will be reported in mainstream media, but one must have the IQ of an eggplant to fail to see this pattern repeated for many years, or to assume it is normal functioning of a healthy market.

cheers!

mike