RDR

Why I'm Closing Atwood Oceanics

Altho I should add that one of the reasons I follow your essays is that you and I think alike. We apparently are investors. Traders (and your moniker is "Trader Mark") usually set closer sell stops (like the 7% rule used by William O'Niel and his followers). But you (and I) unfortunately hung onto these stocks when clearly the market had lost favor with them. Value is set by the market. Yesterday on the Bill Cara website I had a brief discussion about an artist currently featured in this week's Time Magazine. Damien Hurst is the "artist" who placed diamonds on a human skull and attempted to sell it for over $100 million. That didn't sell, but, if you prefer, at his auction next week (where he is expected to make over $120 million) he offers "The Golden Calf" which is expected to sell for between $14.6M and $22M. This "art" is (from Time Magazine) "a white bullock preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that's mounted on a tall marble plinth. His hooves and horns are 18-karat gold. His head is crowned by a gold Egyptian solar disk....The Golden Calf is a nimble concoction, designed all at once to beguile, flatter and parody the big-swinging billionaires who are likely to bid on it."
The value of the above "art" to me is the gold less the cost of disposal of the dead animal and toxic formaldehyde. The value of our oil stocks are likewise set by factors clearly not rational. On the other hand, it is sheer marketing genius to create such "art" and convince someone to buy it for $20M. To me, that ranks up there with some of the greatest stock frauds in history. Remember Bre-X Minerals?