Very odd to witness how the overall market is behaving, where the situation is absolutely horrible for most companies due to higher commodity prices squeezing an overleveraged consumer. The financials are nowhere near the bottom for the credit losses. Yet we see frequent rises across the board on the asssumption that all the bad news is priced in. No matter how bad things get, and it seems more bad news comes along every day, investors are content to buy the dips.

This is a sharp contrast to the mining juniors, most of which have absolutely solid fundamentals backing them, yet there is no bottom, and no traction when good news comes in. The metals are correcting to some extent, and the sell-in-May concept is so well accepted that it should be priced in by now. Nope...

Why is it that the stocks that should be getting crushed are under accumulation, but the stocks that should be accumulated are getting crushed?

I get a bit of flak these days for my stand that it is large scale manipulation that is driving the markets. Okay, maybe I am an irrational conspiracy theorist with blinders on. I read hundreds of articles a month, from across the spectrum of opinions, and form my outlook based on considering all relevant factors. But I am willing to consider that I am a deluded chump and I have it all wrong. So someone please tell me how the markets could possibly behave this way under any conventional trading model that does not involve corrupt funds and institutions doing nasty things behind the scenes, along with the full knowledge and support of the government...

Silly can always get sillier, so I have given up looking for a bottom. I am happy with the prices I paid for my most recent buys, including ECU @ $1.75 even though all of them are down from my purchase price. Sometime I have to believe that the markets will return to rationality and that fundamentals will matter again.

I would like to see if there is some way to do a formal census of shareholders, to determine if there is any kind of counterfit share scam in process. We know there is a failure to deliver issue with many juniors including ECU. What if there are millions of shares that have been naked shorted and never delivered that are ballooning the float and no attempt has been made to make the parties responsible accoutable? That is just one of the explanations I can think of why this stock is down almost everyday for a month, and down on the weekly chart most of the time for over a year...

cheers!

mike