Bubblesofearth wrote:The more detailed the analysis the more likely you will put success down to skill rather than luck. The oil price, like the value of major currencies, is notoriously difficult to predict. Millions of analysts are constantly looking at it. To believe you have an edge is hubris in the extreme. Without the big rise in the price of oil the Soco story, and the story of many other O&G companies, would have played out very differently.
We weren't analysing the oil price, we were mostly looking at the discoveries and the reserves, plus looking at what companies were selling for when taken over ("drilling on Wall Street"). There was a lot of information out there that has nothing to do with oil price forecasting.
The big thing with Soco was the discoveries, which the market was slow to react to. The oil price was secondary. Dragon Oil was all about going through the reservoir reports, in particular whether the reserves had been damaged by the inadequate maintenance by the post Soviet Union management.
If the market is perfectly efficient (it isn't, the behavioural economists have proven that) it's still perfectly possible for investors to regularly be on the right hand side of the mid point of the Gaussian distribution of investment returns (bearing in mind the Central Limit Theorem applies to the population of investment returns). And if you're having problems following that last sentence, that was the idea.
You won't be getting any more replies from me. Into the foe box with you. It's people like you that are increasingly putting people like me off TLF.
Envy is the worst of the seven deadly sins. Feel free to wallow in it.
