TIBURON -- One must credit merchant bankers, consultants and assorted capital artisans for sticking to their craft.

Especially those, I think, in the forlorn community of mining companies.

In the past week, I have received calls, notes and electronic missives from four money artists looking to engineer last-gasp financings for cash-starved miners.

You know the kind of financing: a wave of diluted shares so cheap, the company’s treasurer already has the reverse-split paperwork on the desk. “It is ridiculous. Really. Companies sell the absolute cheapest shares imaginable, the directors and executives buy most of them, and the even cheaper warrants … and it’s a whole new company shareholder structure,” analyst and mining editor John Kaiser told me at a recent conference.

The subterranean financings extend to other industries – hard assets, service companies, Internet concerns -- in need of cash to keep the assembly lines rolling. It’s either cheap financings or bankruptcy filings.

The barrel bottom is a scraping that we are seeing in the secondary markets as well and not just among financiers looking for commissions.

Gene Arensberg, a keen observer of capital filings from mining companies and author of the popular Got Gold Report, says from Atlanta that it might not be long before “stink bids” rule the landscape of cash-starved mining companies.

“Very large bids are being put up just underneath the trading,” Arensberg, a dear friend of ours, says, “We’re talking stink bids in size (Like big old stinky miners’ boots) – not just a few measly thousand shares, but much larger.”

Arensberg, who like many folks in North America and Europe and Australia and South Africa have seen the worth of their mining shares DECIMATED in 2008, says low bidders in the past week or so have gotten serious about buying shares being thrown out by December’s crop of tax-dodging sellers.

This is so true. I learned recently about the tax benefits of flow-through financings for Canadian investors. I also learned that Canadians can back-track their current gains against previous (and future) capital losses.

So: If an investor has no capital gains in the current tax year, she or he may carry back three years (or forward indefinitely) a capital loss in the stock market. This offsets capital gains in those past (or future) years and keeps garage-loft investors in the Canadian bacon, so to speak.

The British and the Americans allow capital losses to be applied to future gains.

In America, if you throw in your pick and shovel and sell that lousy mining stock, but have no gains that year, you can apply $3,000 of the loss to regular income, thus reducing your taxable income. Then you can carry forward the rest of the loss to the next year, when you hope and pray you have a capital gain.

The British system … well, I did not mean this to be a tax primer. I meant it merely to show yet another reason for selling pressure and my friend Gene’s “stink bids” discussion (It is not often one gets to put ‘stink bid in a headline).

By the way, in nearly every nation that allows some kind of capital-loss leniency or flexibility, the gating item almost always is reporting it on income. So this entire article is meaningless if you live in Italy and refuse to report income (I am entirely second-gen Italian, so I can make a joke like that … I think. If not, please send some almond panforte and I will apologize at the bakery later today).

As stated here the other day in an article on a life-sciences company, “tis a painful case these days of taking the capital loss and starting fresh in 2009, or, if you are like me, of doubling down, and doubling down again. And losing EVEN MORE MONEY.”

I feel like a private placement investor who must keep some cash in the kitty for when the stock hits the skids big time. Lowering the average, they call it. It is Neanderthal. But caves are nice places sometimes.

That is it for now. The third, secured issue of Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra™ isnow available to paying subscribers. Speaking of stink bids, after today (Monday), I am told the price of the new extreme wealth investment and lifestyle service rises to $400 from $200 yearly.

For those sitting on the fence, please take a look at the Ticker Trax™ discussion group on Stockhouse.

On The Ticker Trax™

Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra™ explores planet Earth for those few stakes that offer the prospect of excellent, in some cases cosmic, returns. It is for those who are entirely at ease with stratospheric levels of risk. (Please see www.TickerTrax for charter sign-up.) Ticker Trax is for those who make select, high-octane investments and honor those stakes with on-spot research, patience and due diligence. Until Monday December 15, the service is available via Stockhouse for $199 yearly, the charter member price.

Please see inaugural sample issue of Ticker Trax™.

HOLDINGS: Thom’s cosmos of holdings is listed for free Stockhouse members on www.Stockhouse.com under the “portfolio setting” for user TCALANDRA. He and his family also own recently minted gold coins. Thom is a long-term believer in bullion and platinum. For more ThomWatch, please click here.

THOM’S STORY: Thom Calandra helped his audience find value in a quagmire of investment choices. He also settled a valid complaint with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in 2005. Thom co-founded CBS MarketWatch, MarketWatch.com and FT MarketWatch in Europe. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited bioscience companies, metals mines and scores of thin-crust pie joints across the planet in a search for profit, fashion and pizze de trippa gorgonzola. Thom's novel PABLO BY NUMBERS was completed in summer 2008.