What can short sellers do to a stock? They can cause a stock with 7 highly prospective precious metals properties to fall over 50% to less than $10 million market cap in just a few weeks time.

Someone brought this stock to my attention. Barker Minerals (TSXV:BML). It currently sits at 7-8 cents and I find this to be a stock with a ton of potential. I highly suggest you go through Barker's SEDAR filings, in particular their MD&A from April 29th:

Barker's SEDAR filings

You'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have in reading all of that:

1. The stock is vastly underpriced at 7.5 cents thanks to manipulation from short sellers.

2. They have an absolutely incredible set of properties for exploration. Any one of these could result in market caps similar to INM or PEM based on location and grab samples.

3. Management seems to spend more time trying to capture and punish the short sellers on their stock than they are in developing their incredible property holdings. They'd be better off just going about their business and let the stock be subject to an incredible short squeeze like it has in the past.

4. With point 3 aside, it looks like they are finally getting their act together and producing a 43-101 for their Black Bear property in the near future.

The Barker story has been going on for years, but it got interesting on March 30th when the released this set of grab samples. I could go on about how great these look but I think the stock price on that day speaks more volume than I ever could. On March 30th the stock was 5.5 cents and once the stock's halt was lifted on the 31st, it nearly doubled to 10.5 cents on over 11 million volume, but hit a high of 17.5 cents.

Since that day it has been a traders dream, seesawing back and forth several times between 9 cents and 14 cents. But just yesterday a huge buying opportunity arose thanks to this NR about the delay in their gold assay results from Black Bear. After the NR, the short sellers took control of the stock and scared some short term traders into selling all the way down to 6.5 cents. The stock has since found a base at 7.5.

The final piece of this puzzle that convinced me that BML is due for a climb back up is the market depth. I can't easily link to TSX market depth so you will have to research that yourself to believe me when I tell you the ask side is very thin, but I can to the Alpha Exchange. At the time of this post, BML sits at 7.5 cents. I counted a grand total of 5,000 shares being sold in 1,000 shares at each half-cent interval up to 10 cents. I don't know about you, but that doesn't look like something a person would do, pay commissions on 5 different trades totalling less than $100 of stock each. Looks to me more like a computer program pathetically trying to mask how extremely thin the ask size is. If you ask me, Barker is just ripe for a short squeeze similar to the one we saw on March 31st to bring the stock to its 52-week high of 17.5 cents.

BML currently has around 130 million shares. At a share price of 7.5 cents that puts it just under $10 million in market cap. That's not even $1.5 million per property they own and by the looks of the grab samples on Black Bear, these guys know where to find good land. Given all that they have and the tricks being pulled by naked shorters on their stock price I find BML to be an excellent buy at these levels.