It's definitely reducing your return in the short term. Puntland...

It's definitely reducing your return in the short term. Puntland Offshore and Colombia may turn out to be excellent investments, but in the short term your share price increase on a Puntland onshore strike has just been reduced by 7.5% due to 150m extra shares in issue.

As Puntland offshore is going to take 6 YEARS as per the announcement, there's no way any sensible investor is going to factor that into the price. Likewise with Colombia- 3D seismic takes years, don't expect anything to happen there quickly either.

Plus you all know about PL's timescales. 6 years could easily turn into 12. I know you can talk about 'long term' investing, but there's plenty of other opportunities around where wells will be drilled far quicker than in 6 years for the same level of market cap as Range are currently trading at. For an Aussie stock, take a look at GBP for instance- 85% of an offshore block in Namibia which already has 2D seismic data completed and is next to Chariot Oil's (AIM: CHAR) block, which 3D seismic has confirmed has potential 10 billion+ barrels. Currently trading at a market cap of £37m, and about £12m of that is factored in by cash and other assets. It's reasonable to assume with 2D seismic already completed, they'll be drilling a lot quicker than Range will be in Puntland, plus of course the political situation there isn't as volatile. But it gives you an idea as to how markets value assets which won't see any return for years and years- they value them at very little.

So basically, you're suffering a real loss of value in the short term, which is compensated for by the increase in value if you're prepared to hold for 6 years (and given PL's timescales, I'd consider that an absolute minimum, and they'll probably be 10 billion shares in issue by then too!). You fancy 6 years holding? Nah, me neither.

It's all about short term stuff happening within the next 6 months, or within the next year at most. Hell, I've seen stoks drop 10-15% or so just for a few WEEKS delay on a major project, so go figure what a few years delay will bring. Private investors by and large place a very high time value on their money. I don't personally believe this is always justified, as any investor should realise the average stock market gain per year is only 10%. But if you don't learn to play the game, you'll only lose out. If you know a project isn't going to happen for a few months, no matter how good the project is, it's often worth selling out and coming back to it later, as what happens is impatient people think they can make more money elsewhere in those few months then jump back into the original stock later.

And that's exactly what a lot of people will be thinking about the Colombia and offshore deals.