farm out agreement, page-9

Pretty fair comments by all in response to your question Butch 42. I think you know by now there is no easy answer.

All I would like to add - and in response to a point made in an earlier post - is that ALL investments in the share market are speculative. In the macro economics of the stock market you only have to look at the historical downturns in 1929/1987 and 2008 to see that no shares escaped the turmoil. These crashes were generally due to overall external influences.

The thing about this type of catastrophe the market always recovers - but only after time. of course, the best time to enter is after these crashes provided you still do your own research of the individual stocks.

You only need to ask the people who sold their property investments in the 2007-8 financial year only to put it in super for tax concessions and see their nest egg destroyed. If they had waited a while and not worried about the tax side of things then they could have entered the market in Oct/Nov and made a killing almost across the board by now. That is a profit of 30% or more in one year.

Those who held on to their shares (or had no choice in super) will recover their losses but only after a long recovery and good management. We don't know when the next downturn may be but they seem to be ready to blame the boomers (yet again).

In the micro sense of individual shares then some are more speculative than others. There are a multitude of reasons why this is so but in the resource sector, by its very nature, there are more contributing factors to a downturn than others. This is mainly because, in themselves, they speculate in the discovery of those resources. If an individual share does go down, if it has a sound basic structure then it will survive. Most company CEOs will tell you that they can't do anything about the share price they can only promote a company with good management and sound prospects.

This brings me to MEO. Posters for some weeks now have put forward detailed reasons to be bullish about the MEO stock. This is even though some long term holders, like myself, have been put through the mill after some disappointing results. Having said this though, over the last couple of years, short term holders have made some good profits.

At the moment we are waiting for an announcement which will, hopefully, realise some profits. This will be for short and long term holders alike.

With MEO the additional risk will be what we do with those profits. Do we cash them in or speculate further until the next well is drilled. Drilling for oil is a far more risky concern than the impending farmout agreement.

Like neeco said this announcement can go any way but the odds are generally positive imo. Having said that we can really only make our own decision, based on our own research. Ultimately we can only blame ourselves if things go pie eyed.

I only wish I could have found HC a lot earlier as there is a wealth of information here if you know where and how to look for it.

Good luck in whatever choices you make Butch as there is a lot of luck involved no matter how much research you do.