What's Going on with GKP's Share Price?

PUBLISHED: 24 Apr 2014 @ 00:00 | Comments (2) | More info about Lou Gutheil

Is Tedd Kozel practicing for the next Olympic bobsled competition? Because it’s hard to find anything else sliding downhill at the same speed, unless it is Gulf Keystone’s (LSE:GKP) share price! No one else seems to know why, so my guess is as good as anyone else’s. The GKPshare price dropped 6.27% to 86.00 during trading on Wednesday. A rapid decline like that usually drives me to find out why. Here’s what uncovered: nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada.

If you want to ride the bobsled of speculation, be sure to check the ADVFN message boards. Everyone there has an opinion. But, apparently, no one has a clue.

Here’s what we do know:

The last time GKP traded this low (at least by my calculation) was 19 July 2010.
Shares were at a record high of 411.00 as at 13 February 2012.
Shares have traded in a broad range between 18 June 2012 and 10 March 2014.
The single , biggest drop this year was on 14 March, when shares plummeted from 144.00 to 103.25, a decline of more than 28% on exchanges of 19.2 million shares.
Volume throughout the two months of this year averaged, by my own estimate, within the 3 million range.
Since 14 March trading volume has increased significantly to something more on the order of (again, by my estimate) 6 million, including 9.5 million shares today, 7.9 million on 8 April, and 13 million on 09 April.

19.2 million shares were traded on 14 March.
29.9 million shares were traded between 19 & 20 March (another sharp two-day decline).
21.2 million share were traded on 31 March, yet another day of significant decline.
Trading yesterday was at 3.9 million shares.
Nearly 9.5 million shares changed hands today.

Some other facts (?)

GKP was able to close on its $250 millon debt offering, so it should be operationally sustainable through at least the end of 2014.
Todd Kozel has not made any public statement.
The large volumes indicate that the man on the street is getting hammered by institutional investors making moves on speculation.
Investors are antsy. Aren’t they always? GKP has yet to fail to deliver on any promise that I know of, so this is incomprehensible for me (but so is reading my column for some people).
It appears that all milestones are still attainable.

The problem is that we are like Newton sitting under the apple tree, trying to figure out what is making the apple fall. I don’t think that it is gravity in this case, so I am still going with bobsled training.

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