From Jim Sinclair website

It has been the strategy of some hedge funds to pummel the prices of junior explorers in order to starve financially this very important segment of the minerals industry. I suggest to you that if you deduct the transactions that underwriters have made as intermediaries between junior explorers and hedge funds called PIPES, there have been practically speaking no underwriters interested in doing business with anyone but major gold producers.

The reason for this is simple. The hedge funds have so depressed prices that underwriters have no investment interest in them at all. For a junior to do a deal with underwriters or directly with a hedge fund on a PIPE basis is to offer their shareholders up as lambs for the slaughter. This covers the fund short but even worse motivates the fund with a guaranteed 15% to continue the short line.

Peter is correct. There is no money for explorers anywhere until they have drilled off both shallow and deep deposits on their exploration holdings. That is a Catch 22 situation because in the main juniors have no money in the first place and individual high net worth investors - unless they are professional investors - lost their interest in the juniors because of the pummeling by the funds.

The short sellers are both legal and illegal. The legal short seller deserves our respect. That person takes a risk based on their negative investment assumptions, even if those assumptions are malformed by their own lack of due diligence.

The tactics used that exposes their presence are as follows:

1. Defined strategy to sell short all good news released by any junior.
2. Always sells the market closes in order to paint the charts of which the Candle Stick method is most susceptible.
3. Ruins the day traders by setting up false intraday signals and collapsing them which is hard to detect on a daily chart.
4. Populates the chat groups with many false nicknames, some for hire, saying the most heinous things about the company and its management.
5. Sometimes publishes more than 500 negative messages daily on various chat lines.
6. Induces some media people to write articles based on their faith in the informant rather than in-depth fact checking.
7. Spreads false and negative rumors by contacting major stockholders to bad mouth the company.
8. Times selling to interim moves in gold on the UPSIDE.
9. Tries to oppress the gold leaders of each group such as Royal Gold in 2005. Remember RGLD was leading the field of all gold shares then. RGLD was abused by media. It was hit in the high teens and dropped into single digits for one month. The stock is now at $45 and is headed, in my opinion, to $80.

This total lack of investment interest in junior explorers resulting from such organized attacks has prompted me personally to contribute $23,500,000 to the coffers of my public company. I have never received shares from any amalgamation, from warrants or from options, and have been buying shares through private placements at or above the market or in the open market itself. My position came from zero percent in the company to the present level of approximately 3%.

Yes, I did make sales in the marketplace from time to time to facilitate my financial liquidity. In doing so, I accrued the bulk of the 22.5% state and federal taxes that I was required to pay out.