Golden Minerals Company

Through Stockwatch, I examine the trading patterns of ECU every day. And, each day is filled with numerous examples of suspicious trading, particularly through the brokerages CIBC, Jitney, and whomever registers under the psuedonym, Anonymous. Let's just examine a few from Friday.

Much has already been said about the end-of-day sell/dump of 500,000 shares through ITG, taking the stock down from .80@ 3:59:51 to .77@4:00:00, a"market on close" transaction. Even within this example, what has been overlooked by other postings is that some entity, through Anonymous, dumped an additional 100,000 at .77@ 4;00:00. So, we had not one, but two houses dumping at the exact same moment.

I doubt if two separate "long" sellers needed to sell on the final second of the final day of the month of April. In all likelihood, the seller at both houses is the same entity. But, by utilizing two separate brokerages, the seller attempts to mislead the market into believing that additional sellers exist.

Choosing the final second of the month to force the stock to close three cents lower than the price it stood before (.80), can only benefit one who is "short" as that price (.77) becomes the month end close for hedge fund reporting purposes and fee calculating.

In another example, please examine the following trades at 15:46:14 from 4/29:

Since this trade occured on a downtick (.80 to.79), it was initiated by the sellers (Jitney, Anonymous, and Canaccord) and not the buyer (BMO). Once again, how can three sellers simultaneously hit a .79 bid unless all three houses are representing the same seller? This is another example of a seller wanting to mislead and manipulate the market into believing that additional sellers exist-- in clear violation of Ontario and Quebec Securities Laws.

Lastly, I'd like to point out another source of information I examine daily. The table below shows trading results for the four brokerages most active on the sell side for 4/29:

Column 3 indicates the avg. purchase price of the respective firms while column 6 indicates the avg. sale price. Perhaps we should ignore ITG's figures because they merely bought 12,000 shares during the day, prior to the 500,000 dump at 4:00:00.

The other three firms were fairly active on the buy side as well as the sell side.

As you can see, none of the firms were very successful "trading" the stock and making money. Trading desks are often active buyers and sellers in many stocks on a daily basis, and the successful ones consistently make a profit. Otherwise, they would not remain in the business very long. Now, although this is not the best daily example to use (for the most part, these three firms broke even on 4/29), we can pretty much rule out the possibility that these transactions involve profit-motivated trading desks at those respective firms.

I examine these figures daily and trust me, most of the daily composite trades at these firms lose money. That being the case, only an active "short" would be able to sustain frequent daily losing trades and remain in business. Remember, a "short's" motive is to break a stock down, not profit from his daily trades. His "pay-day" comes when he has frustrated the major shareholders to the point where they collectively give up, dump the stock, driving the stock price lower, and allowing the culprit to come in and cover at lower prices. It is practically the same strategy that the bullion banks utilize on COMEX.

BTW, I'm making the assumption that the average prices are appropriate and fair to use, even though all the trades through those houses do not belong to our "short" villain. Going forward, if you are a subscriber to Stockwatch, I hope you will focus on this pattern along with me.

Stay tuned, I think there are some fireworks coming!

Silverbull50