Thanks for posting BM’s comments. He also makes an argument that the price of precious metals is not manipulated. I would agree that physical metal prices have held up reasonably well and that PMs compared to other metals show no special treatment one way or another. However, I will always be suspicious of the paper market setting price that can obviously be altered based on non-market factors of the players in the phony market. After all, delivery of physical over time has not been the primary objective of the “paper traders.”
Now when it comes to miners themselves, EX has addressed this for years and has made it clear that during certain unstable times, the more advanced projects will most likely do better as “big money” is not going to take as big of risks.
Since I am an explorer nut, monitoring my account over the last two years definitely shows price controls probably driven by AI as managed money has had limited interest and retail does not make markets under any circumstances. My account has since Jan 2021 had consistently followed a pattern of some up, some down. hanging pretty much in a “zero gain” pattern, but steadily declining over the entire period. Out of 40-50 explorers in my account, there were hardly ever more than about 5 that ever help a positive balance, but they rotated. Some would achieve gains of 300-400%, but would not hold those gains. I learned to trade those with gains among others with gains, so that I could immediately buy back my trades (only wait 2 days to settle rather than 31 days to take losses). I had enough losses from Emerita to cover two years of any taxable stock gains plus capital gains from the sale of a house as my buys of EMO were .28 and went up to $3.00 or so with more than a 100% retracement over one year and a half. It should be noted that EMO has steadily expanded its resource over the retracement period becoming more valuable instead of less. There is a similar story in Magna Mining but they have one of the better nickel resources in North America which actually should be a very attractive business model for the EV crowd.
Even though I purposely turned over my entire portfolio, the daily behavior of the”account” hardly varied. Now to my knowledge, markets are not historically predictable … at least not repetitive and non-responsive to macro events. Trends can be monitored and technicals applied, but all of that didn’t disrupt my account activity. If you do not wish to call that intervention or manipulation, we can maybe agree to call it “disinterested computer generated” performance based on a non-human monitored agenda.
Another way to look at it is that we had 12 years of a great General Market performance with a concentration in 7 or so stocks. Someone who understood market performance (can’t remember who it was) said one day on TV or somewhere, “if you want to see if a stock is performing with a computer generated program, look for a chart that goes up at a 45 degree angle with very little deviation from the centerline”. The General Markets had a bunch of 45 degree charts over the 12 year period. I guess over the last 2 years I could describe my explorer charts as 45 degree down. My take away has been, charts like those are not “normal” in real markets.
Do Bob may be right that there is no intervention in the physical markets (other than the phony price setting markets). and I could be right that my account has been the victim of computer intervention. There is no conflict with his comments and mine.

They have $1 million in cash, and aren’t drilling right now, so Andrew mentioned they are fine and not trying to raise cash at present, but rather spend the next few months talking to institutional funds, analysts, and high net worth investors about their 100 million ounces of silver equivalent resource just released to bridge the valuation gap compared to peers with similar resources.