Gapwedge,
There have been plenty of posts today on this board and also 7-8 million shares traded – in themselves, such parameters of intense interest have, historically, been a positive predictor of future price action.
The most striking feature of action over the past few days has been something different. Thanks are due to you, to Berg, Howdy and a few others in keeping us tuned in to it.
For months now, especially leading up to January 1st, the drums have been pounding and the SEC has been proudly presenting itself as really clamping down on the whole phenomenon of naked short selling, and against all that widespread illegality – though their language could have been a lot more transparent. At the foundation of the need for action by the SEC has been the murky complicity between shorters themselves, brokers and MMs; all of this has been going on for years. What is so disquieting is that it has been tolerated for years when the SEC knew exactly what was going on.
Now, here we are in mid-January, and everything had seemed set and lined up to squeeze the shorts out by the end of the month, when the Threshold List was initiated. The great invention was apparently that List itself, indicating where the massive short positions to be closed were, to help force the shorts to close and cover quickly. This was supposed to be the key instrument for radical change, a spring-cleaning, a once-and-for-all cleanup to root out all the naked shorting that has been going on. But what has happened over the last few days has been a U-turn for the worse. In the blink of an eyelid every single one of over 250 pink sheet stocks has been made to disappear off the Threshold List. This has been made far worse by the almost incredible excuse that pink sheet stocks only got on to the list “by mistake”. This is a weird statement, which I can only interpret by turning that explanation on its head. The SEC, I believe, suddenly realised that the threshold list as applied to pink sheets stocks would really hit and bite the shorters hard – and that was too dangerous to be allowed to happen, at least on that vast scale. So the whole operation was cancelled and reversed, under that sly, disingenuous pretext that it had all been “a mistake” in the first place.
From our viewpoint, the basic fact we need to grasp is that all the 250 plus pink sheet stocks initially listed have been wiped off the list together, in one fell swoop. Nothing that SunnComm has done, is doing or might do in the future had anything to do with that. The idea of a short squeeze on pink sheets stocks had become too hot to handle, too embarrassing to be allowed to happen. What is more – and it proves my point – is that the stocks on all other markets have been allowed to stay on the threshold list. Just where the SHO and the Threshold List were crying out to be applied and needed to be applied – because manipulatory downward pressure on stocks is by far the easiest on the pink sheets, just there, everything was suddenly reset to zero, with the unbelievable explanation that the whole idea had been “a mistake” and had had to be pulled off the table. So the true error, an inexcusable one, was not made at the beginning but at the end -- the disgraceful idea of putting the whole policy into reverse – in practice, a decision to let “shorty” go scot free and unpunished again!
It stands to reason that the company stocks that are least protected, the ones that most urgently need SEC protection -- from MM manipulation, from the complicity of brokers and their lending of stock certificates to help shorting procedures and the existence of shorters themselves (often powerful, well-financed hedge funds) -- are those on the pink sheets. It is exactly these that have been removed from Threshold List protection! We should also bear in mind that before this disappearing trick, MORE pink sheets stocks were being shorted, and had been listed on the Threshold List, than all the stocks listed on other markets put together. So this is basically an outrageous act of giving in to the pressures of powerful players expert in illegal operations that is bound to harm the shareholders in these companies.
On this IHUB board, some posters have come up with the irrelevant idea ( a real ‘red herring’) that SunnComm has not filed so far. But we need to keep our grip on the fact that both the optionally filing companies and the other, non-filing ones have all, indiscriminately, been cancelled from the list. For the more than 250 pink sheet companies initially listed, filing is entirely optional, but some companies do it – they too have been eliminated. So non-filing has changed nothing That is simply not the issue.
The other highly misleading excuse put out by some spokespeople for the SEC today is that, as they want us to believe, the total share float cannot be counted or tracked. This is sheer nonsense. For each company, the transfer agent has, by law, to be publicly announced, so it would only have taken a 2-minute phone call by the SEC to find out the exact total float for each pink sheet company. These figures are always kept up to date by Transfer Agents.
It really looks to me as if the SEC, and its various agents and sub-agents, suddenly woke up to the fact that naked shorting on pink sheet stocks has become a huge issue and that — for the first time in all these years of naked shorting on a huge scale –- a great many shorters were getting lined up to be hit hard by the end of this month of January. So what had to happen? The pink sheets stocks, those only, not the others, had to be spirited away into invisibility. In the historical language of South American politics, the pink sheets stocks “have been disappeared”. In practice, the SEC, embarrassed though it is, and placed under the magnifying glass because of this two-faced behavior, has still gone ahead, and given the shorters a new lease of life. We need to keep our eyes and ears primed to follow up on this scandalous event, which flatly contradicts what the SEC had said had to be done and would be done.
Another point. Today the MMs were again blatantly manipulating. I will soon be sending a second post on this. In practice, what the MMs were doing today, in halting the upmove in SP at 7.4 cents was to place a “glass roof” (an unbreakable plexiglas skylight) over the market at that price, so that, whatever the demand, it could not be allowed to rise further. Whatever the disparity between sell trades and buy trades, the market makers just would not allow the price to go up any further.
So I say to all the longs here, we should now be extremely careful, and we must let the SEC know we have understood they have unjustifiably backtracked from their long-announced policy. We must now do everything we can to react with decision against that!
alj14
AI
