onwards and upwards Following up on a couple of points that have been made lately:
In my opinion Walter Vrataric, our CEO, has done a great job. His presence is one of the strong points of CKE. In a relatively short time, in a lousy market, he has not only successfully disposed the surplus assets but also restructured the company into what it is today - an operation with no debt and very defined goals.
As to the lousy share price - we are not alone. Bigger peers like Bonterra, Baytex and Bonavista have also tanked. In fact, if one takes into account the Craft payout, we are probably better off than most. What hurts is the low volume. Some clown can sell 20,000 shares in the last 30 minutes of trade for 2c down and knock $3,000,000 off the capitalized value of CKE. It would be great if CKE was dominated by a single major investor who could and would defend the share price. We need a big brother - a merger with a private entity perhaps. Consolidating the shares (say 6:1) would not hurt either.
As to the future objective, I think the whole paradigm has changed for Canadian energy companies. The Toumaline model was to reinvest profits and build capital with the thought that a major would eventually make a buy out bid. Sadly the majors are all selling - Shell, Conoco Phillips, and the rest are no longer around. So much for that plan.
In my opinion, what Chinook needs to do is to revert to the traditional Canada energy / resource model. This over the long term was expected to repay a shareholder’s investment through dividends - think of the old unit trusts. If Chinook were to announce that it intended to start paying an annual 5c dividend come 2018 - which it could easily do - the share would in my opinion be trading at 60c. Yes growth would be a bit slower - management options would be worth a bit less - but whole bunch of shareholders would be a lot happier