To give one a sense of the headwinds the miners are facing from questionable activity in the market let's take a quick look at Tanzanian Royalty TRX on the U.S. side. Differing tactics but with the same goal face many of the miners. I have seen trading in Tyhee that has annoyed (angered) me for years. It is the often repeated idiotic sale of 100 or 1000 shares during the slow period of the day so that this thinly traded stock has price setbacks to overcome almost constantly.

But here's the story with TRX. Mr. Sinclair has taken a position where he wants to act humanely with the public investing community by virtue of his website. It appears the company of which he is CEO is being punished as a result. The company's shares usually have a short position of about 10% - 13% which is quite high. During the recent move in gold I watched the tape as TRX traded and I watched its price being held down. It was blatantly obvious.

Today the short position as shown by my Yahoo finance portfolio has TRX listed as a 22% short position. This has occurred in spite of changes in the company which should lead to its being in production (albeit at very small scale) in the near future. A stagnant or falling price in spite of good news and high gold price and you can see it occurring in real time.

A 22% short postion in a company with about 92M shares outstanding is roughly 20M shares. A little less but let's keep it that way to make the math simple. TRX trades about 500K shares daily on the U.S. side. 500K X 40 trading days = 20M shares. So in order to close out that short position it will take a continous stream of short covering (long side buys) lasting 8 weeks with no other "long" positions being entered and no short positions being added.

What investor of group of investors would deliberately get themselves in a position like that if profit were their motive?

I think this is an extreme case but less vigorous and differing tactics are being applied to all the juniors IMO. When the dam breaks, I think the rises we will see in the prices of these companies are going to be well worth the anxiety we deal with on the short term basis.

P.