"Tar Pit" heheFYI. DYODD.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Strata Oil & Gas--La Brea Tar Pits?
The 10Q Detective received this 'confidential' letter delivered to our Post Office Box yesterday from the desk of Ian Chambers:
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A Massive Price Spike is Imminent...Buy Strata Oil & Gas, Inc. (SOIGF.OB - $2.22) now to lock in ten-bagger profits.
Behind closed doors, MASSIVE blocks of oil-rich properties are being turned over to select companies like Strata , who are picking them up for peanuts and turning them into MULTI-BILLION dollar oil projects.
Imagine my excitement when I discovered that Strata is quietly putting together a serious oil sands portfolio in [Northern Alberta] an area teaming with multi-billion dollar oil projects.
Strata is sitting on a vast underground lake of oil...estimated to contain 94 BILLION barrels of oil....that translates into a gross value of up to $4.7 TRILLION.
This stock could easily blast through $25 per share.
--Ian Chambers, Editor, OUTSTANDING PROFITS
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Strata Oil & Gas is a company founded on shaky ground. The Company, formerly known as Stratabase, previously generated revenues by selling databases of sales leads and mailing lists, and providing technical services aimed to customize and improve the quality of the databases sold. Stratabase had an open source software that was designed to allow users to interface with and manage these databases, and customer relationships. It was the expectation of management that by giving the software away for free and making it open source, a demand could be created for the Company's database and technical services.
Unfortunately--for shareholders--this business plan did not work. Therefore, the decision was made by management to alter Stratabase's business model to focus on proprietary software. In 2004, the Company began charging a monthly fee for use of its software. Simultaneously, management sought to develop CRM Software, which was designed to enable corporations to save time and money by improving the efficiency of its workers. Sifting through Stratabase's June 30, 2004, SEC filing, however, revealed that this proprietary software, called "Relata," was released in beta form in June 2003, but never got past the testing phase! Interesting--in the first six-months of 2004, the Company generated ZERO dollars in revenue, yet had general & administrative expenses of $266,627. As Stratabase did not have an active sales staff to sell its database services (!!!), this means that G&A expenses consisted primarily of depreciation and amortization of databases and domain names, and salaries paid to the eight company employees.
Courtesy of Stocklemon.com, the 10Q Detective has also uncovered that Trevor Newton, CEO, CFO, Secretary, and Treasurer [NO KIDDING!] and Fred Coombes, Director of Business Development, were both former stock promoters. Epilogue: On August 19, and August 23, 2005 respectively, Trevor Newton and Fred Coombes resigned from each of their respective positions as directors and officers of the Company. [ed. note. sorry, at press time we were unable to determine how many--if any--Strata Oil shares these two guys might still own]
And this brings us to the present. In 2005, the company underwent further changes, acquiring four wells drilled on land for gas exploration. The property is in the Wabasca oil sands in Northern Alberta. That year, Strata Oil & Gas underwent a major management reorganization as well.
The editor of Outstanding Profits, Ian Chambers, touts that Strata is on its way to being a $25 stock. If that were so, why did insiders file, in September and October 2005, to sell approximately $2.0 million worth of company shares? Did the 10Q Detective fail to mention, too, that Tucker Banks Publishing, the owner of Outstanding Profits, was paid the sum of $210,000 to enhance investor awareness of Strata Oil & Gas!
Albeit we admit to not being qualified geologists, in the opinion of the 10Q Detective, Strata Oil & Gas owns the equivalent of sticky sand. This small-cap company is focused on the exploration and development of heavy oil / oil sands in Western Canada: (i) Oil sands are substantially heavier than other crude oils, are very viscous and do not flow easily, and (ii) no economic criteria has been applied to the analysis of drillings and the company has not determined how much if any of the resource may be recoverable with existing technology.
Do not be like a dinosaur and get stuck in this La Brea Tar Pit of a stock.