Wise words...but along with patience, good investing calls for realistic expectations. Even Bell Potter acknowledged this week about the "market's waning patience and skepticism of Paloma Deep" (thanks JianTan for finding this quote).
Remember, in November 2011 NEN announced results for the Paloma Deep exploration well and Ken effused that "We look forward to commencement of production testing." One year later, we're still waiting.
By comparison, some OZ oilers in the US are doing production verticals in a month and horizontals in 60 days (contracting out). Exploration wells take much longer, of course, due to analysis, and Paloma is a deep well (13k feet), but not this long!
Also, NEN has to realize that the market doesn't trust exploration oilers as much as it did before the GFC. Thus, NEN needs to dramatically increase its Californian production output, even if only to prove up the resource beyond the prelim exploration well results (but also to avoid another embarrassingly ill-timed capital raising).
Let's hope news this next week makes my little rant look silly!
NEN Price at posting:
25.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
