it's a casino there

Samscout hit the nail on the head with this one. Buying shares in these smaller cap gold stocks isn't investment. It is simply buying a ticket to the small rollers' room in the casino. The large cap gold stocks having been moving up with the gold price - the EVNs. NSTs etc. Their larger shareholding is a little more difficult to manipulate.

Performance at the mine site has virtually nothing to do with RMS irregular price movements, particularly in the face of such a strong upward spike in gold itself. What we are seeing is price manipulation by one or more hedge funds playing well within the rules of the ASX casino.

One hedge fund liquidated a lot of it's holding in RMS on Friday Dec.16 last year as Samscout said, finishing at about 42c. From there to Jan.10 this year, the price moved very rapidly to 64c. (in the know advantage buying) and from there it continued to rise to 73.5c around Feb.16. The second leg of the price increase was slower at lower daily volume. How many littlies bought in then? The conventional play then began to take cream off the top and the "sophisticated" game to short the stock to billyo took over, regardless of any underlying gold price fundamentals (probably helped by a miss in guidance, but that was just icing on the short cake).

SLR shows strikingly similar pattern. A low of 50c at Dec.16, a very raid 50% recovery to 76c. on Jan.12 then a gradually sell down to 55c last Friday.

The one bright spot in all this is that when the sell-down phase of the funds game is over, recovery can be very rapid. So hang in but realise that the well-dressed players at the table next to you could be carrying knives in their socks.