PC Gold Inc. (TSE:PKL) stock price 1.86 today

Here are all the house positions for : PKL for 3/29/2010.

23 Records Returned

House Positions

	Exch	House	Bought	$Value	Ave		Sold	$Value	Ave		Net	$Net
		99 Jitney	599,100	1,029,852	1.72		296,700	503,606	1.70		302,400	-526,246
		33 Canaccord	528,783	892,362	1.69		229,180	388,930	1.70		299,603	-503,432
		7 TD Sec	868,220	1,518,675	1.75		638,350	1,111,413	1.74		229,870	-407,262
		73 Cormark	61,600	102,872	1.67		0				61,600	-102,872
		62 Haywood	56,500	103,780	1.84		0				56,500	-103,780
		80 National Bank	69,128	118,607	1.72		25,400	44,402	1.75		43,728	-74,205
		94 Hampton	20,000	32,600	1.63		0				20,000	-32,600
		48 Laurentian	10,000	18,000	1.80		915	1,692	1.85		9,085	-16,308
		83 Mackie	20,000	32,660	1.63		13,000	23,050	1.77		7,000	-9,610
		9 BMO Nesbitt	58,700	102,100	1.74		52,300	90,337	1.73		6,400	-11,763
		2 RBC	77,636	129,916	1.67		75,400	126,160	1.67		2,236	-3,756
		58 Qtrade	400	660	1.65		0				400	-660
		15 UBS	500	830	1.66		500	890	1.78			60
		141 Bolder	13,500	22,740	1.68		15,000	25,550	1.70		-1,500	2,810
		85 Scotia	339,066	596,251	1.76		343,290	596,830	1.74		-4,224	579
		81 HSBC	58,780	101,809	1.73		64,455	109,856	1.70		-5,675	8,047
		46 Macquarie	12,000	21,180	1.77		20,000	34,800	1.74		-8,000	13,620
		124 Questrade	70,950	122,701	1.73		100,500	176,395	1.76		-29,550	53,694
		95 Wolverton	0				49,000	80,080	1.63		-49,000	80,080
		79 CIBC	274,900	468,164	1.70		333,160	567,156	1.70		-58,260	98,992
		19 Desjardins	21,750	36,881	1.70		100,863	174,648	1.73		-79,113	137,767
		89 Raymond James	0				92,200	155,965	1.69		-92,200	155,965
		1 Anonymous	231,900	393,547	1.70		943,200	1,634,427	1.73		-711,300	1,240,880
		Total	3,393,413	5,846,187	1.72		3,393,413	5,846,187	1.72		0	0

PC Gold Inc. (TSE:PKL) stock price dropped on Thursday after a couple days of intensive rally when the company discovered more gold with their recent drillings.

Stock price had climbed the $1.58 top on Wednesday, when the price appreciated 136% in just 1.5 days. Trading volume went overhead with up to $10 million dollars per day rotating through the stock exchange deals.

The market is slowly calming down after the initial burst, but the price is not likely to return to the pre-rally levels considering the improved potential of the company.

The short lived rally was a culmination of a few months of holes drilling. The development stage company is yet to make any revenue from these discoveries and thus remains a risky investment. Their capital base is currently sustained through issuance of stock/warrant units, as used in their most recent funding round.

Under the current cash reserves of over $8 million, the company could keep up their activities for another 2 years, if they kept the expenses to roughly a million per quarter. No plans of actual exploitation of properties were announced yet.

PC Gold's Pickle Crow Property is their only wholly owned mineral claim. The leasehold is also a subject to two 1.25% NRS Royalties.

The Big Short, the culprits were Wall Street's swinish greed and its obsession with making a quick buck.

Don't blame greed for the financial crisis

Ian McGugan, National Post

What caused the subprime meltdown and the global recession? If you listen to Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, the culprits were Wall Street's swinish greed and its obsession with making a quick buck.

Lewis knows how to make his case. His new work of non-fiction is chock-a-block with characters that any novelist would envy: a one-eyed investment genius, the world's rudest money manager, and a swaggering bond trader who thought he was the smartest guy in the room until he lost US$9-billion. They make for a wonderful tale. In fact, there is only one problem with Lewis's technicolor account of the subprime crisis. When you strip away the color and the characters, it doesn't really explain much of anything.

Think about it. If porcine greed, by itself, is enough to crash the financial sector, why doesn't Wall Street crash every year? For that matter, why should the crash of the subprime market result in a recession so much worse than the one that followed, say, the dotcom bubble?

To answer these questions, you should read a very different book. Slapped by the Invisible Hand is a dry account of the financial crisis by Yale professor Gary Gorton. It's nowhere near as fun as Lewis's tale, but what it lacks in entertainment value, it makes up for in explanatory power.

Both authors go back in time to pinpoint where the problems started. Lewis, for his part, believes the rot began in the 1980s, when Wall Street investment banks transformed themselves from partnerships into publicly traded corporations.

The transformation meant that investment bankers no longer had a lifelong stake in their business. Rather than working under the watchful eyes of fellow partners, they had only anonymous shareholders to satisfy.

As Lewis tells it, the pros realized that anything goes under the new rules. They dropped their old school obsession with serving the client. They began to explore ways to screw the customer.

Financial engineers found ingenious ways to push hidden risk onto customers. For instance, the engineers took piles of dreck -- subprime mortgages given out to people who "were one broken refrigerator away from default" -- and restructured the trash into spiffy-looking securities called CDOs (for collateralized debt obligations).

Credit raters such as Standard & Poor's and Moody's were happy to accept a fee and slap investment-grade ratings on large portions of these CDOs. Investment bankers then proceeded to stuff the highly rated garbage down the gullets of gullible institutions that believed they were buying a riskless investment. Hence, in Lewis's view, the subprime bubble. And, hence, the inevitable collapse when mortgages started going bad.

So far as it goes, all of this is fair enough. But Lewis's lurid take on investment bankers' villainy seems incomplete. Granted, Wall Street is nasty, but that, by itself, doesn't explain the financial crisis.

One problem with blaming everything on the investment banks is that the banks themselves seemed baffled by what was going on. Many held CDOs and were surprised when their holdings turned bad. In retrospect, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch don't look like evil geniuses. Schleps, more like.

Then there's the mystery of how the souring of the subprime market could taint the wider economy. Subprime losses were less than half a billon dollars. How could that bring down a US$60-trillion global economy?

Gorton's book provides an explanation. He says that traditional banking in the United States is not that profitable any more. The big loot has migrated to the "shadow banking" system -- investment banks, hedge funds and off-balance-sheet "conduits."

Shadow banks don't take deposits so they rely upon short-term loans to fund their needs. They raise these loans in the so-called repo or repurchase market. Under a typical repo deal, a shadow bank borrows $100-million overnight. In exchange it gives the lender a security worth $100-million and promises to buy back that collateral the next day at a slightly higher price.

So far, so good. But the hidden weakness in the system is the choice of collateral. By 2007, it had become highly rated slices of CDOs. When the mortgage market started to sour, the value of those CDOs came into question. Lenders were suddenly willing to lend far less money against the shadow banking system's collateral. The result was a massive exit of capital from the system -- which, in turn, forced fire sales of assets and a vicious spiral of falling prices and even more sales.

Gorton sees this as being like an old fashioned run on the bank. Bank runs ended when deposit insurance was introduced, so he thinks government should step in to rate securitizations and guarantee the best parts of them. If such a system had been in place in 2007, the shadow banking system would never have spiraled into disaster.

The contrast is stark: Lewis sees Wall Street as a den of sin that needs radical reform; Gorton views the problem as a broken fuse and argues that a bit of rewiring could put everything right. There's no doubt that Lewis is the more entertaining writer. But Gorton is the more interesting thinker.

Ian McGugan is a freelance business journalist who writes for the Financial Post.

©Financial Post

Top 50 U.S. large cap stocks with most upside potential

Below are the top U.S. large cap stocks with most upside potential, calculated as the difference between current price and Wall Street analysts' average target price.

Ranking | Company (Ticker) | Potential Upside
1 The AES Corporation (NYSE:AES) 59.6%
2 Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK) 58.4%
3 Southwestern Energy Company (NYSE:SWN) 54.5%

4 Nabors Industries Ltd. (NYSE:NBR) 49.3%
5 Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation (NYSE:COG) 46.5%
6 Halliburton Company (NYSE:HAL) 42.1%
7 National-Oilwell Varco, Inc. (NYSE:NOV) 41.3%
8 Range Resources Corp. (NYSE:RRC) 40.0%
9 People's United Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:PBCT) 38.9%
10 Helmerich & Payne, Inc. (NYSE:HP) 38.4%
11 CONSOL Energy Inc. (NYSE:CNX) 38.2%
12 El Paso Corporation (NYSE:EP) 37.3%
13 Schlumberger Limited (NYSE:SLB) 36.3%
14 Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI) 36.0%
15 Devon Energy Corporation (NYSE:DVN) 35.5%
16 Pactiv Corporation (NYSE:PTV) 33.4%
17 NRG Energy, Inc. (NYSE:NRG) 33.3%
18 Baker Hughes Incorporated (NYSE:BHI) 32.8%
19 R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (NASDAQ:RRD) 31.8%
20 EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT) 31.0%
21 Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON) 30.7%
22 Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE:ADM) 30.2%
23 Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC) 28.6%
24 Peabody Energy Corporation (NYSE:BTU) 28.2%
25 Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. (NYSE:FCX) 28.0%
26 Quanta Services, Inc. (NYSE:PWR) 27.9%
27 Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) 26.9%
28 Tenet Healthcare Corporation (NYSE:THC) 26.8%
29 Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) 26.5%
30 Alcoa Inc. (NYSE:AA) 25.7%
31 Invesco Ltd. (NYSE:IVZ) 25.5%
32 Questar Corporation (NYSE:STR) 25.3%
33 Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) 25.3%
34 International Game Technology (NYSE:IGT) 24.6%
35 Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ:EXPE) 24.4%
36 Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) 24.3%
37 Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) 24.2%
38 Apollo Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:APOL) 24.2%
39 Denbury Resources Inc. (NYSE:DNR) 23.9%
40 Apache Corporation (NYSE:APA) 23.9%
41 International Paper Company (NYSE:IP) 23.6%
42 Cameron International Corporation (NYSE:CAM) 23.5%
43 Jabil Circuit, Inc. (NYSE:JBL) 23.2%
44 Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) 22.8%
45 The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (NYSE:GT) 22.6%
46 Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) 22.0%
47 Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT) 21.9%
48 Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) 21.7%
49 Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) 21.4%
50 Analog Devices, Inc. (NYSE:ADI) 21.1%