Very good post Wes. I will add this bit (after 15 years or so of junior gold investing).

As an investor/speculator, if you try and explain movements in these stocks or attempt to justify them you will go crazy. Quite often thye have no ryhme or reason. Maybe it is MM's, maybe it is a fund buying or selling a large position or maybe it is just fear and greed with a few traders. But the fact is, it is these price fluctuations that give each one of us a chance to profit. Over time I developed a system that is as simple as this. I hold about 50% of my portfolio in 'core' holdings - stocks I want to own for obvious reasons, ones I wont sell until the true value gets realized. The other 50% I simple trade in and out. It can be the same stocks in my core positions or it may not.

Actual illegal manipulation of a stock is very hard to prove. And so what if they did prove it? What would we gain? Nothing most likely. This is simply the way the market works. The key is to USE the fluctuations in the individual stock prices to your advantage.