never discount manipulative naked shorting on the venture..short postion is only reported 2 x per month..its awfully difficult to police short term real time shorting ever since they removed the restriction..its not just brokerage firms that can do it...some beleive it one reason venture has had a disastrous year..that said given how stable share price is for PTK dont think it applies here..we would see many bashers on this board if it were so ..the two go hand in hand naked shorting and constant bashing.....here is a good article on the subject..................................................Short selling
Last October, Canadian regulator Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) eliminated the “tick test,” which barred short-selling of securities on a “downtick.” In other words, a stock could only be shorted if its price was going up (the most recent order was at a higher price than the order before).
The move had been expected, following the removal of similar rules by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States in 2007.
But there are a lot of advocates on the junior side who believe that short-selling shouldn’t be allowed for smaller-cap stocks (MacDonald Mines CEO Kirk McKinnon, for example).
Mosher notes that short-selling a junior stock that has a $10-million market cap and trades 20,000 shares a day can have devastating and crippling consequences in the current market conditions.
Ivan Lo of the investing newsletter Equedia also believes that short-selling has been abused and says the regulators can’t monitor all short-selling activities in real time in order to detect abusive activities.
“If it was up to me, I would say that you should just remove short selling on the junior market altogether,” Lo says. “Because ultimately, the junior market is about one thing: It's about investing in companies primed for growth and allowing that company to grow. You can't allow a company to grow if you allow short selling in that market.”
In a recent post , Lo writes that he believes the elimination of the uptick rule and the introduction of other rules in October that drain liquidity from the market have had a negative effect on the S&P-TSX Venture index.
Juniors have also complained about naked shorting, where a security is shorted without the trader having first borrowed stock or determining that stock can be borrowed.
Complaints about naked shorting in the juniors were also common during the 2008 financial crisis.
