 Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Terry Lynch and Peter Cawsey on a very topical subject, predatory short selling. Terry, let's start with you. Define what it is predatory short selling is to you. So, we're not against short selling. So, what is short selling? Short selling is when you bet against the security. You think it's going to go down and you say, I sold the stock short and you're looking to cover in the future, hopefully at a lower price and make a profit. So, that's completely legitimate and we're not against that. What we're against is when you don't declare a short sale and you sell the stock with the hope that it goes down, you haven't declared it short and you never declared it short and you just keep on selling because this is what happens and eventually it does selling to get selling and it drives the price down and then you cover. That's predatory short selling. So, it's non-disclosure short sales. And of course, Peter, I'm certain you have a couple of two cents to add to that. Do you agree with that definition of predatory short selling? I do, but I would expand it a bit to include times when a company's stock is fragile and some idiot's looking just to kick the shit out of him when he's down. And I find that offensive when people use short selling as a means of settling personal petty revenge matters. Compliance question. Of course, sure. Compliance expert Peter, are there any compliance regulations that you can speak to on this topic? Well, the big one is disclosure. You and I've talked about this before. So, I like with conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest don't kill. Undisclosed conflicts of interest kill. And it's the same thing with short selling. It's like the guys in British Columbia who don't register with SETI and yet they feel free to trade all day and the securities commission's response is they didn't hurt anyone. It's the disclosure that needs to be made. Yeah. Transparency is the key. I think Peter's absolutely right about that. And there's appalling lack of transparency in our capital markets today. And people are pulling out. You're seeing, as Eric Sprott said to me one time during an interview on this topic, he said, investors aren't stupid. You know, they figure out a rig game and they get at it. And that's where we're at. And we're not, this isn't just limited to mining. This is the junior tech game, the junior oil and gas and not just in Canada either. This is a pervasive problem. It's been a problem around the world since they put in. Basically, I believe algorithm trading was a checkered flag for this whole thing. I interviewed a guy by the name of West Christian. He's a lawyer in the States, probably the top litigator in the space. He's won, I think, 10 or 11 lawsuits in the 11 figure, like 10 to 60 million I've heard in settlements from Goldman Sachs and the like, the big investment banks. And basically, he feels it's probably every company's got 20 to 30% short in America. Wow. That's a big number. He says it's trained the dollars. He said, if you were selling, he uses an example about truck permits, printing truck permits and selling them out the side door. Well, they take you off to jail, but they do this every day in the market and nobody's going to jail. And a large part of this is what's the complaint in the silver market, but why the silver price is more abundant, undisclosed, funny trading. Gentlemen, I'm going to pull you back again. Predatory, short selling, finding a good definition online is almost impossible. Who gets to decide what's predatory and what's not? Terry, I'm going to throw this back at you again so you can dumb this down, because many people out there are not even aware that this exists. So I think to keep it simple, if you sell a stock and with an intention for it to go down and for you to cover it, if you don't declare it as a short sale, then that's predatory. Whatever your motivation, if you don't declare it's a short sale, when you don't own the stock and you sell it, that's a predatory action against the market. And that's, I would say, is the definition. I disagree with you a little bit. The first sale which is undisclosed is illegal. The second sale is predatory because it's piling on to the first which has not been disclosed. The first one is merely illegal. Okay. So Peter, if I understand we're now disagreeing on if it's a little evil or a lot evil. Is that correct? Different kinds of evil. The first sale is illegal if it's not disclosed. The second sale is predatory because it's piling on to the first illegal sale. Peter, I rarely see any news stories covering this type of issue and someone actually being fined. Am I just missing something? Where do I find this information? I've made many complaints to regulators over the years, as you know. And the response I often get back is we're not going to tell you if we're investigating or I get an off-the-record phone call with. It's just too much resources for us and he's just going to appeal anyways. So we're just going to continue to chase the broker who printed a pink ticket instead of a blue buy mistake because he's easy. So no, there are no cases out there. There is actually in the U.S. a number of cases and but you know what's interesting is you'll get like wet brush or whatever that broker's firm is called. They'll be fined $6 or $7 million for $70 billion worth of transactions. I mean, it's a rounding error. So what happens, you'll get like a significant 7-figure fine and you think, oh, wow, now it's $3 million fine to XYZ brokerage firm. You think, well, that's pretty significant but it's on billions in trading. So it's a fraction. It's a cost of doing business. I don't know of any in Canada. Yeah, I don't know of any in Canada either. Iraq is not too active in that area, that's for sure. But the U.S., they typically find them but it's the cost of business for the brokerages and they just move on to the next victim. Terry, you have created a formula to help deal with a problem. You've created save Canadian mining. Would you not be putting together a formula to catch this or provide some kind of repercussions or what is happening with save Canadian mining? Because we all want to support you. We just want to understand what we're supporting. Sure. What we started off to try and do, what we thought would be the best and easiest simplification to solve the problem was to reinstate the tick test. So before 2012, around the world, there was a tick test before it could short stocks. In other words, stocks had to be going up before it could short them. So that naturally sort of acted as sort of, that meant most stocks didn't get shorter. And the reality is, well, that was because generally speaking, exchanges were to allow companies to raise capital, allow investors to have multiple opportunities. But when they allowed algorithm trading to command, you remember the promise of algorithm trading was it's going to enhance liquidity. It's going to reduce friction, reduce commissions. And our institution, our pension funds and our mutual funds will be able to get better returns for our investors because of this reduced friction. That's just a fantasy. The reality is the smart guys, the really smart guys in the room, figured this stuff out early on. And now they got these algo bots out there that looks at your bid and ask across multiple exchanges that only a computer could do and sees who's weak and who's strong. And they pound your symbol down because they got unlimited capital. And that's what happens. And so you see very inefficient capital markets. Capital markets, I mean, in mining, it's super simple because we're easy. We have to raise capital to do our drill programs. And it's sort of back in the day, when Ned Goodman was funding mining companies and Frank Mercer was funding mining companies, you would go to them with a concept and they would say, yeah, okay, we believe in it. We'll give you so much capital and they would call us other investors. You'd go and you'd execute. If you drilled successfully, your stock went up. If it didn't, wasn't successfully stock went down. That was capitalist and that's what made Canada the mining capital of the world. That no longer happens. And that's the tragedy of it all. Okay, so Peter, reinstating the tick test. Do you have any idea how we might make that happen? Well, that's just the Canadian securities administrators across Canada getting together with Quebec and implementing a rule. That's actually not that difficult. But there's more to it than that. The various securities commissions have to actually prosecute people, not just on this, but on other things. They have to be built up as regulators to be afraid of, like the SEC. In Canada, they need to be given better power, better investigative power. The SEC could walk in and arrest you. No securities commission in Canada can do that. So we need to toughen the teeth in the right ways and not in knee-jerk reaction like 43.1.1, which is largely a waste of time at paper. Give the commissions real teeth to go get the bad guys. Well, on that note, I'd like to encourage both of you to come on Investor Intel to discuss other compliance issues. You, Terry, on behalf of SAVE Canadian Mining, of course, Peter, as our top compliance expert in Canada. Thank you both for joining us today. Great, guys. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.