I've been silently lurking for the past few weeks, watching the...

I've been silently lurking for the past few weeks, watching the action and am as excited as the rest of you guys. Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been relatively silent for 2 reasons. (1.) Very busy with work. With the risk of sounding like a pretentious bastard, I'm relocating from NY to Tokyo in 9 days and this is absorbing all my free time. (2.) I was stung last year, not by the negative posters but by those who bought in at the top during drilling season in good faith then despaired when HDR hit rock bottom a couple of months later. We'd always said it was a long term investment and that the patient investors would be rewarded but some people were angry with me. I realised that posting on this forum would encourage more traders to play football with HDR which introduces painfull volatility not beneficial to long term holders like myself.

The big question is why HDR is trading at only 0.79 a share which barely covers Chinguetti, let alone Tioff, Banda and god knows how many other salt domes waiting to be punctured. The answer is because it has no instituational support. The share price is being driven by traders who don't care about the instrinsic worth of the underlying share.

Why don't the fund managers & other financial institutions invest? Most of them have mandates that restrict the type of share they can invest in. Small cap non income producing wildcatt oil explorers are on the black list. HDR will be reclassified once it has an income stream. When Chinguetti starts pumping out 75000 bopd in 2005 HDR will become a producer and be reclassified and will then garner instituational support. In 2005 HDR will be worth a couple of dollars a share, until then I have no idea. You might as well get Yogi to do an astrological chart.

Hang in there guys, as Warren Buffet said "the stock market is a mechanism for systematically transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient."