This is for Buddyboy
Hi Buddyboy. By your posts it is obvious you have an intense dislike for the Artisan management team and believe they are likely to bring grief to their retail investors. You may well be right. I don't have a dog in that fight. I am not an Artisan shareholder and have no intention to ever become one. I am a DeeThree shareholder and closely follow their activity in the Alberta Bakken. Last June Artisan stuck their nose in so I have been watching them ever since. In that time I have come to admire the wheeling and dealing skills shown by the Artisan management team. Here is why. Last spring they had little cash, little cash-flow, they had breached their loan covenants, and the bankers were on the verge of shutting them down. In southern Alberta they had some land at Conrad they wanted to drill and two sections of land at Weston for which they had no plans. Then they noticed that DeeThree was extending their Alberta Bakken activity to the east and was trending towards the Artisan Weston lands. They made a deal with an unnamed company, possibly Journey, that owned five sections of Weston land. By drilling an ABB strat well for about $1 million they got an 80% interest in the seven sections of Weston land. Then they traded the information from that well for a 30% interest in a JV with an unnamed company, probably DeeThree. The JV covers potential future ABB land purchases and E&P work in a 120 section area. Then they announced a potential Viking acquisition from Magnum conditional on their ability to raise about $5 million in financing. Then they did a farm-out in the Tomahawk area with an unnamed company, possibly Velvet, that improved the quality of that asset and they only gave up a 60% interest in one section of land. Then they did a very suspicious farm-out in the Conrad area with an unnamed company, probably DeeThree, where they got an ABB strat test well which they can now use as the vertical bore for a future Sawtooth horizontal and they only gave up a 60% interest in a quarter section of ABB rights. They can now show their potential financiers a better Tomahawk asset, a potential Viking acquisition, a vertical well bore at Conrad, and a JV with DeeThree with results from two ABB strat wells. All that came at a cash cost of only about $1 million. I think that is an amazing display of wheeling and dealing. If they don't get the financing the company will probably be shut down but that is where they were last spring. If they do get the financing their financial woes will be over for a while and they can get on with E&P work. The retail investors may get diluted greatly and they may yet be screwed over by management but at least they have some chance now.