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Gold/Mining/Energy : Donner Minerals (DML.V) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Surething who wrote (2492)	12/22/1997 10:32:00 AM
From: Buckey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11676

DML and NAI creeping up today on very slow volume. I guess all the interest is over on CRN. Both of above are up 7 or 8 cents. CYP heading north also. Normally on low volume and this time of year we would see it moving a little south as the sellers hit the bid. There is some interest on the buy as new bids are coming in and driving them up. - NOT a lot of volume - but nonetheless interesting. Is something else is store here????????????????????

To: Surething who wrote (2492)	12/22/1997 8:14:00 PM
From: Grant Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11676

Alfie, Surething: what you are seeing are the "uncovered" shorts. Canadian brokerage houses do not have to disclose their "covered" shorts. A covered short is a short position that the house "covers" from its stock of shares already held in trust for their retail clients like you and me, or from it's own corporate account. So long as the house has not lent out or "shorted" more than half of the stock of a particular company that it is holding in trust, etc., you and I will not know the true short position on that stock. It is only when their short position actually exceeds the 50% mark that a house is required to disclose the "uncovered" short positon. When an individual house has shorted more than half of the shares of any company that it is holding in its own corporate account and in street name, then it must report this fact to the exchange. That is the basis for the short report. It alerts the exchange to the fact that house XYZ no longer has enough share certificates on hand to "cover" individual investor sell orders if more than half of the shares currently held in trust were to be sold in the near future. (From a regulatory point of view this is something that the exchange has an interest in, since orderly trading is the exchange's responsibility.) If there were to be a large retail customer sell off of a particular stock while a house has an uncovered short position, the house would be forced to buy shares in the open market to "cover" the shares being sold by its own clients, thereby driving up the price of that particular stock. The "uncovered" short report is therefore not a true indication of the entire short position on any individual stock. It only represents the "uncovered" portion of a house's short position (ie. that portion which exceeds 50% of the shares held in trust, etc.). The true number of shorts is much, much larger, but unless you happen to know how many shares of a company the house has on hand, you will never know the actual short positon. Do you follow me so far? Did any of that make sense? I know it sounds complicated, but it is the best that I, a non-professional, can do to explain the "short" game in a paragraph or two. Maybe someone else can correct me if I am wrong, or provide a better explanation of covered and uncovered shorts. Best of luck. Happy Holidays.