I'm a PTA shareholder and will be looking to redeploy some of the capital that is returned to me when the GTE deal closes, so I started to think about my next investment and this bullboard post on the PTA board regarding Petrodorado's (PDQ:TSX-V) special dividend peaked my interest. I had always somewhat followed PDQ because at one time they were a comparable for PTA.

PDQ was trading at an average price of approx $0.20 per share from July to special dividend announcement in Novemeber of $0.40 per share based on the cash PDQ holds and the liquidated value of the shares of Amerisur PDQ holds. Right now the stock trades at $0.335 per share, so value investors that recognized the disconect of the share price with the cash value per share of PDQ picked up a nice 68% return if they sold today and might realize a 100% return on collecting the dividend.

Returns like that are almost impossible in the engergy space right now, so this got me thinking....who else could pay a special dividend???? I started screening for companies in the international oil and gas space like PDQ that were trading at significant discounts to their net cash value from their Q3 finanials.

3 companies meet the screening criteria are:
1) PetroFrontier (PFC:TSX-V)
2) Condor Petroleum (CPI:TSX-V)
3) AmericasPetrogas (BOE:TSX-V)

PetroFrontier (PFC) has net cash of $9.8 million as at Sept 30 and 79.6 million shares outstanding, so that is a net cash value of $0.123 per share and PFC is currently trading at $0.05 per share => implied return from a special dividend equal to cash value per share is 146%.

Condor (CPI) has net cash of $49.3 million as of Q3 and 346.1 million shares outstanding, equates to a net cash value of $0.143 per share and CPI is currently trading at $0.08 per share => implied return from a special dividend equal to cash value per share is 78%.

AmericasPetrogas (BOE) has net cash of $66.3 million as of Q3 and 231.7 million shares outstanding, equates to a net cash value of $0.286 per share and CPI is currently trading at $0.205 per share => implied return from a special dividend equal to cash value per share is 40%.

Of note CPI and BOE still have oil and gas assets that have likely have value that could be liquidated to generate returns in excess of the simple net cash return I presented above.

I'm a value investor, and though I missed out on PDQ, I'm going to take the learnings from that outcome to invest in a basket of the three above mentioned stocks. Before I do though I wanted to check with the message board and see what others think.

I welcome your thoughts on my Christmas project above.