I have no doubt that the big trades late on Friday were pre-arranged. A cross is negotiated ahead of time. Buyers or sellers of a large block will solicit interest and call around to try and set up the trade in an orderly transition. If there is a fund that has a large position that wants out, the buyers can offer a price and if it is agreed on, they will then take out all of the stock for sale at market until that block can be crossed at the agreed price. Depending on whether it is a buyer or seller that is in control of the transaction the market price will be walked up or down to make the trade. In this case it appears to be the buyers on behalf of the fund that wanted the shares and were willing to pay above market.
Take out the 'noise' related to the big trades to allow the funds to buy their allocation, there were millions more shares changing hands on Friday, and that would support my assumption that shorts are losing their control of this stock and paying up to cover. If one had been shorting well-above a buck, then even buying anything available at market last week would have generated a profit. Prior to this I believe the shorts were sitting on fat buy orders and letting the weak sellers dump to allow them to cover. I also suspect that the same players have been playing a wash-rinse-repeat cycle with chunks of stock shorted and covered and then shorted again during intra-week volatility. This is not a short squeeze, its the shorts who have been capping the stock for many months that are now taking down their profits and backing out before the retail buying frenzy starts again.
So what is different now? Well, I would expect at least a few offset holes have now been completed in the MS zone. If this zone is going to be a breakout hit, one might expect to see wide intervals of sphalerite, massive pyrite and calcopyrite, or galena, each of which are obvious from visual inspection of the core, and clear indicators of high grade mineralization. Even tetrahedrite and argentite may be seen in chunks of core in the richest intervals. If they pull several meters of this kind of alteration, then it would not suprise me at all if someone from the drilling crew is on a cellphone to tip some people off. In fact it is almost impossible to prevent that from happening. The market is aware that significant drilling is underway and if I see sustained buyers taking out the offer for multi-million share turnover volume over several days, then I am pretty sure we have a very good drill hole or two pending.
cheers!
mike
