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Volumes are going to remain low if Mr Market-Maker's bid/offer spread is > 5%...hard yards to pay that spread and sit on a 5%+ loss immediately...and sadly I fear more of the same...as there ain't much stock about and if / when the buy back starts, lord only knows where the company is going to source what they need to buy (eg $10mm worth - which at today's FX and market price of 29.5p is slightly over 25million shares...ho hum...this is no attempt at a ramp up, its purely simple maths...the free float is so small what with Tosca > 60% and MWP > 10%...

I think you might mean doubled down - :-) - doubling up is a lovely feeling, tho happens all too rarely in my investing world! Good luck, if we get to 1.40, then I will happily buy all the posters on here a glass or 2 of something cold n fizzy...provided we of course promise to keep being rude to each other!

alongside the lovely and totally expected news of the failure of STT to derail SLE, we could get an announcement of the safe arrival of the quarterly cash payment...be just the sort of thing to help the SP break above the 30p barrier and give the company the wherewithall for the stock buyback process to start in the near future...

Guiseppe, the points you make are valid and not dissimilar to the ones that the optimists amongst us make - we may well be wrong with our analysis, we may well be wrong with our market timing. What we have all tried to say is this looks like a new co, SLE 2.0 as I called it the other day. If longterm and deeply pained shareholders do not believe this is the case, by all means share your fears but its the baseless attacks that we do not need, such as the saga with STT. The old saying leopards and spots etc are well worth remembering and should have been part of our, the new investor base, due diligence. However, if like me and a few others you can suspend belief that this company can only destroy shareholder value and look at the likely forecasted cash flows in the weeks and months ahead, its not hard to construct a narrative whereby some, and undeniably not all, of those horrendous losses suffered in SLE 1.0 might be regained.

'A price monitoring extension is activated when the matching process would have otherwise resulted in an execution price that is a pre-determined percentage above or below the price of the most recent automated execution today. '
Its all slightly gobble-di-gook, but basically you get these announcements when a share price is moving too far or fast for all orders in the system to be matched up...in this case, I would suggest there are many more buy orders than sell orders....

S8, you know you were asking whether you should average down your position in SLE the other day - reading your comments from yesterday, I actually believe you'd be better off just selling outright...you patently have no trust in management or its largest shareholder, who it would seem surprisingly to you, decided to sort out the company's generic problems using their own balance sheet and shock / horror charged for the privilege...10% for the loan to an oil exploration company which you patently distrust so manifestly would seem to me to be cheap money...hey ho... and if you are so surprised that SLE hasn't been booted off AIM, then its really no place for your money, even if you've by your own admission lost, what 80%, of your original investment.
This is such an obvious investment - Alaric and I and a few others are either right - whereupon it is SLE 2.0 and the shares are ridiculously cheap here on any metric and we will make some nice ££ or he and I and those few others are getting it all wrong - namely that the board hasn't changed, there's fraud throughout the whole rotten thing, dealing in Nigeria is impossible and whereupon we'll lose what you have lost - pretty much 100%...
It just happens I personally think this is probably a 5:1 payout if not more and with oil at $80 and with the helpful financial muscle of Tosca behind the company, its a bet I'm happy to take...but if you are so pained that your so frequently need to post how rotten the whole thing is, then get out because as all great investors (of which I am most definitely not one!) know buying a share is easy....selling it is hard...and you will feel a helluva lot better saving the 20% of your investment than watching it go up in flames...equally, you'll feel more than a little sick that the day you sell, the share price responds with a move straight back to a £1...then you really will be able to chunter!

Skullbone - sorry I don't..I was purely looking at a chart that I follow...29.22 was the high in June, so we need to clear that, 30p was the Oct 2017 high, then 37p which was the high when we returned from suspension in April....and 45p was the placing price, from which it all started to go wrong! So plenty of work for it to do, I'm afraid...good weekend all.

If i'm going to get a slap, can I have it from Snow White rather than any of her dwarf friends?

On a slightly different note, for any discerning chartists amongst you, looks to me like heavy resistance between here and 30p, then a gap to 37p then 45p...quite a few shares have gone thru this week, another 150k today so interest slowly building...fingers crossed we get some news re the quarterly repayment next week...

My take on a stock buyback and what it really means :
There are 3 things the company can do when it buys back stock - and none of them are in anyway dilutionary, lets be clear about that...
It can buy the stock back and cancel them...eg if you think of each equity certificate as an IOU, it buys back 10% of the equity and cancels it...then the company has 90% of the stock it had before hand...good for EPS as you are dividing earnings by a smaller number of shares...and the preferred way of huge US multi-nationals who make gazillions of $$ and have no other way of boosting their EPS...
It can buy the stock back and hold them in treasury - to resell at a higher price to avoid exactly the dilution you worry about...so lets say it buys 10% of the stock of the company back at an average of 35p over the next 3 months (nice idea, huh)...it holds them in a treasury account and in 6 months time SLE says, for example, we want to buy a stake in XYZ oil field...and we are going to sell those shares we bought at 35p 6 months ago at the new exciting 50p share price to a new investor who likes our strategy, thereby absolutely preventing any dilution of which you are so concerned.
Or option 3. it can hold those shares and use them to reward those it feels have done the company a great service without drawing down on valuable cash...again no dilution by issuing of new shares, just a gift per se to the FD, or the CEO, or whoever...at the company's discretion...might be a bit of grumbling in the cheap seats, but they are the board and you have by investing in them given them the right to run the company as they see fit...
All 3 of these options have merits...all depend slightly on the company basically saying we have no better use for the cash that we are building up in our coffers (through these quarterly repayments) but none of them will impact your shareholding should you not care to sell your stock...which is absolutely up to you...which leads me to point 4...a point I have tried to make a few times...
If the company gets permission to buy $10mm of the stock back...and 75% of the outstanding stock is in the hands of either Tosca, MWP or the board who i think we must believe are in this for the long game, then who is going to sell them the stock...at 28p? Ergo, the share price will have to rise to a level, whatever that be, where you, or me, or S8, or BlueRill, or Blackswan or whoever decides right, I am happy to sell...now that might be 30p, it might be higher...but you have to make your own decision when you want to sell your stock complete in the understanding that a stock buyback is NOT a bad thing!

Stephen 54321, you obviously haven't been reading about the saga of SLE for long enough!!...I believe the market will not give SLE the benefit of any doubt until it can witness the positive cashflows which we anticipate. Despite my and a few other optimists' comments as to the likely direction of travel (likely can be translated as hoped for!), I think you will need to see - probably in this order but as usual I will stand corrected :
Confirmation of the company's receipt of this quarter's $18mm loan repayment,
Confirmation of the stock buyback request being granted
The Start of the stock buyback
Confirmation of the receipt of next quarter's $18mm loan repayment
Then maybe end of Q1 2019 signs that Eroton will start to release cashflows due to SLE on the basis of their 9.7% holding in OML18...
All of these will be positive steps to persuading the doubters, of which there are an understandably large amount that this is indeed SLE 2.0 (as I posted earlier) and that it might then be safe to give SLE the benefit of the doubt.
Until then, I reckon its a slow grind upwards...what is heartening from a price action perspective is that we seem to have stopped those heart-stopping gap downs which happened everytime someone mentioned STT and Court action...hopefully thats been kicked into the long grass!

Ug - not an easy answer for me -
Unrisked, we value Barryroe at US$9.5/bbl (net to Providence), implying a NAV of over 150p/shr. Factoring in an overall 64% chance of success (comprising 80% geological and commercial chances of success, respectively), we calculate a risked Core NAV of 101p/shr, (of which 3.1p is cash and warrant exercise) so 97.7p. There are 597mm shares outstanding so mkt cap would be c £580mm, entirely due to the value of BarryRoe. 4.5% of £580mm = £26.1mm - which might be a better valuation - using their 64% chance of success methodology.
But I am no accountant and as others have pointed out am prone to a few errors (in the don't let the facts get in the way of a good story) kind of way!

Alaric is spot on Bluerill - I hope i have never suggested Tosca are the brains behind the investment opportunity in Nigeria...what Alaric rightly points out is that without their recent support, it would have been unlikely that SLE could have got to where it stands today...and indeed, given Tosca have invested as heavily as they have in SLE, it de facto supports your comment that they have and we should have faith in Mr Fanning and his plans for the company. Now, where is that latest quarterly payment :-)?

To be fair to Tosca, Alaric, if you own 60+% of the company and have single
Handledly positioned SLE to where it is now, we might forgive them if they
didn’t buy any more shares!
To those other posters like me who think the equity offers some good value here
then it’s not hard to believe that other larger institutions - especially those in
less well regulated countries might also see the attraction of SLE.
Enough ramping for today - don’t want to be told off by those quarrelsome squirrels!!

Frus - your frustration is completely understandable...all of us (I'm sure) will have invested in something that made complete sense only for the imagined profit to disappear in smoke in front of our very eyes...mine was a sandalwood plantation in Australia - don't laugh, its almost the same as oil in Nigeria :-) - where upside was very apparent...until it collapsed in one giant ponzi scheme!
All we have tried to suggest on this board is that maybe, just maybe, SLE is now in with a shout of improving shareholder returns...and whilst you have every right to believe the board has form in completely F****** it up, the balance of evidence would suggest that with the steady hand of Tosca on the wheel, their more idiotic decisions maybe a thing of the past. My posts of yesterday, which were poorly written and rightly questioned, purely tried to transpose my thoughts on short term cash flow (eg return of some of what is owed to the company back to shareholders) as a rather enjoyable tonic whilst we await the main show - aka the performance of OML 18 and as Bluerill says (and he seems much more au fait than me with the hedge) OIL at $85 must be helpful...you may not get £4 back, but I would be very surprised if we didnt see a more substantial re-rating once these pesky quarterly cashflows are confirmed.

BillfromBristol - the point that i patently failed to make was simply :
SLE is an oil explorer hoping to become a producer
It is owed $150mm +
It is valued at $150mm +
The share price doesn't recognise any value attribution to its Eroton and BarryRoe assets...if, whilst it waits for its principal exploration investments to perform, it decides to return the majority of what it is owed to its shareholders, it can do so in a way that would make SLE an extremely attractive investment. Most exploration assets trade on the potential of the oil find etc - here we have a company with 1 x world class asset (OML 18) and one exciting one (BarryRoe) and in the meantime you might just get some stock buybacks and dividend return neither of which should impact the share price, given that the share price (if SLE can be traded like any other exploration company) should be based on the potential and perceived value of the exploration assets.
I do however apologise for the misleading comments below...back to my kennel.

I was thinking as I walked the dogs this afternoon - if we the optimists are right...and the news flow is as positive as we think it is...and the cashflows do come (lots of 'ifs' here you will notice!)...given STT are now out of the way (because there can be no way on god's green earth that there is a court case now that they have sold their equity that they seem to have conveniently forgotten they had)...and given the company is going to buy back 6% of the outstanding equity later this month / November...that I'd hate to be short....seeing we rallied 10% on volume of 1.1mm shares...to repeat the company wants to buy 30x that volume over the next 6 weeks...
And then I thought...gosh, what happens if the January $18mm cash payment turns up...and they decide to return it to share holders of the long suffering variety via a dividend,as they do the other 3 payments next year...that is $72mm to be returned. At the start of business today, the company was valued at $165mm...that's a 43% dividend yield...so i thought again, I'd hate to be short and paying out 40+% for the privilege of being short...
With that I called the dogs to heel and decided to keep all fingers and toes crossed that these mischievous quarterly repayments come to fruition and that we get to enjoy them rather than a new owner....so no thank you to a takeover at these levels...

I also thought it might help if we garnered some facts on what a share buyback might look like...
There are 4 rules for a company operating a share buyback :
Manner of purchase: The issuer or affiliate must purchase all shares from a single broker or deal during a single day.
Timing: An issuer with an average trading volume less than $1 million per day or a public float value below $150 million cannot trade within the last 30 minutes of trading. Companies with higher average trading volume or public float value can trade until the last 10 minutes.
Price: The issuer must repurchase at a price that does not exceed the highest independent bid or the last transaction price quoted.
Volume: The issuer cannot purchase over 25 percent of the average daily volume.

And simple maths : at 25p SLE has a market cap of £127mm...at $/£ of 1.30 = $165mm...$10mm = 6.1%...total shares in issuance 500mm...so total shares to be bought back = 30mm shares...average daily volume over past 6 months looks like 50k-100k, with only 3 days when total volume has exceeded 500k. So, it might take them sometime or the price will need to a level where more sellers abide?

Morning all - Afraid i'm like the other optimists on this board...this has to be good news if only to rid the company of a painful relationship with STT...we might one day know at what price the ************** has happened, but at one fell swoop it removes a huge overhang of shares (that I had previously posted might have been where the company found its stock for its buyback)...remember all shareholders, you are under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to sell your shares...the company will need to bid a price for them that makes commercial sense for any holder to part with them on any given day...what we do know is that there will be a buyer of 10% of the company's equity and the one potential seller is no longer there...i reiterate my view that a rise up to that 45p in Q1 next year is most likely direction of travel...now, if we could get confirmation of the quarterly $18mm repayment this week, then that would also settle nerves as well!

If you issue a load of shares at 45p in exchange for debt ...and you then buy them back at 25p-35p....its a little financial alchemy...it wont help the poor sods who bought the stock at 45p...but for the company its quite good business...not that they'd want to make a habit of it! And I'm not sure we want the company sitting on cash Blackswan, as we have seen it gets tempted to spend said cash in some pretty poorly judged investments..so return to shareholders in form of share buybacks best for all.
I think we can all agree its been a poorly run company (there will be some of you who might want to use stronger language)...however, without banging on too much there is a chance that future cash flows will enable some recovery. I think 45p is a logical target, but might need feb's quarterly loan repayment to get there...
Finally S8, valued at 6x cash is really quite generous? Not sure how you quantify 'generous' when we are owed a further $150m and those pesky quarterly seem to keep turning up +/- a few days on time...

Sorry - one no doubt of many erros in that post...$500k = 2 million shares, so 3-4 times the highest volume day of the past 4 months.