Monday 13 February 2012

GKP hits 400p and rising


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And continuing the story of this wild share, today it has topped new highs. Can't say whether it will end up here today but at time of posting it is 402p.

Now,  in the middle of last year you could have bought these shares for a pound; the rise has been stunning.

Yet, the newsflow has been quite poor, well the official newsflow. The 6 drills which are ongoing all seem to be doing OK - except Arki Bijeel which maybe not producing the size of finds that GKP has managed at Shaikan. Others are all progressing well to confirm the huge finds - with maybe 3 billion barrels or more of recoverable oil at Shaikan and the other sites.

In the last year there has been no progress at all on the Iraqi government passing an oil law that would once and for all validate GKP's Kurdish licences. This consitutes a huge political risk that has held back the share in the past.

Instead, today the price is driven by wild market rumours of takeover's at £6-£8 by either Exxon or Total. Many in the city and I note particularly the journalists who write up the City market reports every day are very down on GKP. They have been since it was a tiddler 3 years ago (cough, tipped to buy it at 25p here and did so myself). And with some reason as there are a lot of downsides and risks in this business - now big enough on market cap to easily be in the FTSE100.

Analysts too tent o have their buy price at around £2.50 on average - so at £4 it is looking pretty toppy to them. Of course, the analysts have not built in the takeover premium.

So where next, what is interesting is that volumes are now high, with £10's of millions traded every day. The days of a couple of hedge funds starting a retail panic (the share has a very large retail following, myself included) and making a killing through shorts may well be gone - the capital needed to kick this off being too high compared to even a few months ago.

Several well connected people assure me there is some foundation in the rumours and it will come to a takeover in a few months. Even that still does not leave me thinking that I know what to do - am putting a trailing stop loss on at 20% in case of a sudden bear raid or negative news event.

4 comments:

Richard Elliot said...

The absence of the oil law and several news articles mentioning the potential for civil war had me running scared last week.

I decided to take profits at 313p last week. I still made a good return and am trying to avoid looking at the share price since!

Steven_L said...

Yeah, tighten those stops (and touch wood there's no big market gaps).

Anonymous said...

huh wish I had taken your advice!

I didn't like the idea of buying into Iraq.
If Israel strikes on Iran the whole region is gonna kick off imo.

HarryD said...

I ended up selling mid-morning Tuesday and buying into XEL instead. However if the outlook is good by Friday I might go back in with them. What Anon said has a lot of weight to it, the recent Iranian enrichment plans make this kind of investment incredibly risky is such a volatile location.