I'm an ex holder too (sold out the day after the quarterly). I was burned very badly by this one. Plenty of people have been watching/holding this one for a long time, it's not surprising a lot of non/ex holders are interested.
For me, the quarterly just wasn't good enough. Still not cashflow positive, maybe SEA will be next quarter or the quarter after, but if so, only just, unless the POO dramatically increases. I think it's fair to say we were mislead along the way, but the price of oil hasn't helped (having said that it went up a bit after close on Friday and SEA's open tomorrow may be interesting, though I'd say it would be lucky to beat 13.5 and may go down in spite of the POO).
A marginally cashflow positive company with massive debt isn't a good proposition. A year or two ago they could have sold up the assets and we'd have done really well. I suspect they were (and maybe still are) planning to sell them, but the shale sentiment and POO tanked, very lucky to get Dimmit sold when they did and it showed what we were valued at then, but displayed by the nerves we had about the possibility that the Dimmit buyer would back out, it's obvious the assets just don't have the market value they did not so long ago. It's not surprising that there is reduced desire to buy/hold SEA now.
SEA/the Eric has always been a deal maker more than a manager/operator. Unfortunately the oil market didn't allow things to looks pretty enough in time to make a deal, and now SEA sits with assets no one wants which have not been managed well which makes them almost unsellable, and the business really isn't going well. The quarterly wasn't exactly tragic, but it didn't give me a reason to continue holding. When the redomiciliation was first announced I considered immediately selling (and wish I had!) but didn't expect it to drop this much and expected it to recover after it was resolved (whichever way it went). I still think it will increase after the resolution goes either way and people know where they stand (either Australians will buy back in or Americans will be glad to have the Australian issues gone, while currently no one knows what the structure will be and obviously an unknown thing won't sell for as much as a known thing), but the quarterly wasn't strong enough to make me think many people will be hugely interested either way, so the potentially small gain is likely to be less than the hassle of dealing with American tax issues etc. If I was an American I'd be inclined to buy at the last possible time before the resolution is known, but as an Australian I decided to chuck it in with the uninspiring quarterly being the final straw.
A lot about this whole situation stinks, Eric (and management in general) is probably worthy of a visit from a lynch mob, shame on me for not seeing it sooner or managing it better.
Part of why I held was the likelihood of major conflict in the middle east spiking oil prices. I still think that's a possibility, but after the recent refinery attack did basically nothing I am a little less inclined to see it. Trump has basically taken out ISIS, things are perhaps likely to be a bit more stable between now and the next US election (Trump has continually spoken of keeping oil prices low and if they go high it'll hurt him badly, so he will do anything it takes to keep them down until the election), and if oil prices are flat or down for another year I think SEA has a lot further to fall.
I really don't think things have gone as well as we were lead to believe they would at the price of oil that we had. Things in general haven't gone as well as we were lead to believe they would given all due considerations. This leads me to believe things probably won't go as well from here as shareholders are being told they will, and we're not even getting much word about that. I had some suspicion that after the redomiciliation, management would play some cards it had been holding up its sleeves (questionable as that may have been), but if they were holding such cards, they're likely no longer playable anyway.
It's painful to think that just recently I was sitting on a profit on SEA but hung on and sold at a burning loss. Such is life!
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