beachinvestor, I realise where you’re coming from and I can only...

beachinvestor, I realise where you’re coming from and I can only reply as far as I understand the company’s intended objective of the buy back.
This was to increase the heavily undervalued share price and bring it closer to intrinsic valuation ie around 5c a share. That is, the company believed the market was not properly valuing the worth of the business.
Now we don’t know how they might view progress towards closing this valuation gap. Perhaps they have some milestone time targets in mind, say 2c end of June, 2.5c end of July, 3c end of August just as for instances.
But can they achieve their objective, by “playing hardball” with the market and trying to shake out and grind down every loose 1.5c or even 1.4c a share seller. And how long do they sit at those prices until they decide that the sellers are reduced to a trickle. Months?
And then rinse and repeat for 1.6, perhaps months again?
yes surely what you say is true about the actual costs of buy back being cheaper at lower prices, but I feel that for the company’s share valuation to increase via the buy back, they will have to be more flexible in their approach.
Now that the wider oil community sees our reserves valuation, our stunning operational success, the strategic importance of our Swish assets, vis-a-vis Continental’s possible future development plans as outlined earlier by Peto and Danpech, then I think there is a danger of an opportunistic takeover at our current low market cap. But that’s just my pet fear.

i haven’t worked it through in a more complete table with half cent intervals but I suspect the actual additional cost of a more “pushy” buy back which moves the share price needle significantly, would not in fact be crushingly more expensive.
But again it’s all theoretical.

yes indeed always a risk of sellers piling in as the share price increases, but isn’t this always the case. People jump off, people jump on.
I believe no share buy back will support a long term rising price, only excellence, in operations, and in management,which we have in spades.
of course we all hope external factors don’t turn against us

sorry for the rambling post, look forward to sharing some more thoughts with you