InterOil: What The InterOil Math Teaches Us
by ilene - September 22nd, 2010 2:12 pm
InterOil: What The InterOil Math Teaches Us
Courtesy of Roddy Boyd, THE FINANCIAL INVESTIGATOR
In the world of finance theory, a credible suggestion that you are being forced to raise cash at exorbitant rates or are internally valuing your assets sharply below where the market appears to value them is traditionally a death sentence for your share price. The reasons for this are straight forward enough: Investors hate desperation but not as much as they hate making an asset play and being wrong on the value of the assets.
Then there is InterOil.
A Cairns, Australia- and Houston, Tx-based oil and gas producer that has been touting in one form or another a potentially epic find in the wilds of Papua New Guinea for more than a decade now, it recently raised cash at exorbitant rates and appears to be internally valuing its assets way below what the market appears to think they are worth.
Yet all is well in the share price department.
The story is none too complicated: InterOil, a company whose shares are seemingly made of titanium, is paying rates for cash that only credit cards aimed at those with bad credit can obtain. Better still, the person pulling InterOil’s eyeballs out is its long-time sponsor and key investor, Clarion Finanz AG and its controversial chief, Carlo Civelli.
[Civelli’s record as a broker, investor and promoter of a series of often troubled energy enterprises drives skeptics somewhere north of berserk. He and InterOil have loudly proclaimed that he is little more than an investor and advisor, although the power dynamics of this picture would seem to indicate otherwise. When having your company feted at the NYSE, it is customary to have the CEO or the company’s founder/guiding spirit ring the bell at the opening. Civelli, in the picture, is the one reaching over to ring the opening bell.]
To call InterOil a battleground stock is to be droll. The dispute over the proper level of its valuation and prospects in every sense of the word is analogous to the sanguinary trench combat of the First World War’s Western Front. Short-sellers, critics and investigative reporters raise more and more questions about management disclosures and candor but the stock continues to enjoy robust support. To follow through on…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.