Market manipulation of precious metal stocks on Friday.

The stock market has become a very risky place to invest your money. Friday afternoon, while gold was rocketing to record highs, nearly every gold stock I follow dropped off a cliff. Either someone with huge $$$$ was shorting or there was mass hysteria.
I think the market is being manipulated. Here's one way it can be done.

"Naked short selling "has got to push the price down," says James Angel, associate professor of finance at Georgetown University. He says the rate of short selling has nearly doubled in the past five years, to 36% of all trades. In the same period, assets held in hedge funds, which are active short sellers, more than doubled, to more than $1 trillion."

http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1126706-1,00.html

all over the place -- this is just the latest horrifying example.

sigh -- the same folks who ''the market'' are probably some of the most powerful political leaders in the country -- if only we really knew who they were.

Some of the gold stocks I follow were down on Friday, but nothing by more than 5%. For the week, most gold stocks I watch were up by a pretty healthy amount. Looking more broadly, Yahoo! Finance's Gold sector was down 0.88% for Friday, so I wouldn't really sweat it. It too was up roughly 3% for the week.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/134.html

Seeing the price of gold go up in no way guarantees that an individual gold-related company will do well . Expectations of higher gold prices have been priced in already. Further more, most gold companies I watch have a short interest of under 5%, so it's not likely that that is having a huge influence on prices. If you want to make a bet on the price of gold going up, I think the cleanest way of doing so is to look at the iShares Gold trust, it's an ETF with the symbol "IAU". (Clever huh?)

Is there any other sort of manipulation or foul play going on? Maybe, but of course that is the risk you take.

Many small PM stocks were down 5-10% from the intraday highs. What I'm seeing is a timed program.

... are getting frothy. With gold well over $500 and silver hitting $9, pullbacks were to be expected.

The medium-term trend is still up, up, up IMHO.