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A bad RNS let alone a mundane one is already priced in. Flowing a deep will not lift the share until it has been flowing for some time. Remember January?

I am looking for theQ3 export percentage to move back towards 60%, the export price to be around $40 and an output in the range 1600-2000 bopd. This will resolve the cashflow issue moving forward. Share price recovery is all about MJF with perhaps a little help from Yelemes IMO. Once the cashflow problem is resolved, then we can worry about the deeps.

Of course if we do get a deep flowing, it will very good news, but as I see it, we need to fix the basics first

Brent is back up over $43 this afternoon, powered by Trump's dexamethasone high. MJF is clearly profitable at these prices and justifies a much higher share price. How those profits are spent on trying to get a deep to flow remains the key question and one which hopefully we will get some better answers on soon

MLQ, they probably can't answer the questions until they have got they've got their RNS on Q3 together. No doubt CC is working round the clock to achieve just this.

Mr C, The British economy is the natural home of money laundering from gangsters, particularly from Russia. We are much less civilised than we think. Interesting stuff Adrianz, but actuslly we could work out that CASP were resolving its cashflow problems in the UK as well, with a little gentle simulation as we discussed on this board over the summer.

CASP may have treated AIM badly, but what is actually gooing on here is a shorting opportunity which hopefully will end with the next RNS

With answers to shareholders questions due this week on the company site, there should be an RNS as they can't provide sensitive information on that site without also providing it to the market.

As always we are waiting on news here. Expectations are now so low that any good news on Q3 should lift this share. We should get an RNS next week

are due on or about October 6th according to the website. It would make sense if they produced the Q3 RNS on or just before that date, since they can't release sensitive information on their website without also letting the market know via an RNS

If 60% of each barrel is exported at $40 and 40% is sold locally at $6, then the revenue from that repesentative barrel will be $26.4. In the AGM question they said a Brent price of $40 led to $21 net. If this is revenue net of costs that suggests costs of $5.4 per barrel. Since we were separately told that we get less than Brent (but not told by how much), this squeezes the implied costs further.

Separately we were told that a Brent of $35 led to breakeven. Plugging $35 into the above revenue of a representative barrel yields a revenue per barrel of $23.4. This implies costs are $23.4 per barrel. This is an estimate and will be over by the amount by which the CASP export price falls short of Brent. We thereforel end up with a much higher figure for costs than in my first calculation if CASP's export price is anywhere near Brent (the January and February RNS's suggest it is reasonably close)

Both these things cannot be true or if they are then substantially different definitions of costs are being used.

Because of this contradiction, I wondered whether the AGM figure of $21-$25 might be net revenue

Kumkuat, when I did a back of the envelope calculation of the revenue in Q3 based on 1640 bopd at the weekend, i assumed $40 for export and $7 for domestic, based on CCs comments in the last AGM. It still came in at $3.5m - $4.0m for the quarter

I was always a bit unsure about the AGM answer of $40 Brent meaning $21 net for CASP. Did it mean net revenue or revenue net of costs and if so which costs was it net of? $35 for Brent was described as breakeven which helps a little but not that much!

I'm longing for this shorting to be over. We were last at this share price when the oil price fell through the floor. Clearly the sp is currently all about the interests of the shorters and nothing to do with the actual value of the share. Irritating, but nothing we can do about it - we just have to wait for them to go away.

and a fairly steady share price so far this morning. There is almost certainly some shorting activity here, and it may be early days, but as good a Monday morning as could be expected.

We need a moderately good RNS in early October. 151 and 141 flowing would be good. Any news on Yelemes would be helpful. Some flow, even if as yet uncommercial, on the deeps would be great.

Hi Seagulltrawler, I would agree with your estimate of 1000 bopd extra, but for a conservative (and therefore more believable) forecast of CASP finances, I would put that increase into Q1 2021.

Supposing oil hits $50 in Q1 next year and local prices come back up to $10, both of which are quite reasonable assumptions and in line with current forecasts, this increased output would result in a revenue of over $8m for Q1 2021, i.e substantially more than all of H1 2020, and about the same as the midpoint of my forecast range for all of H2 2020 (see previous post).

As for further investment in MJF, expanding output even further, I think we have to leave the timing of that to Clive because the priority issues this winter are cashflow and debt management.

The quality of the RNS was as usual poor, but the quality of the financial reporting in the press was also poor as I argued yesterday. The timescale for improvement is as Ade suggests because it will take time for the better news to arrive. The slightly annoying thing is that we have had extensive discussion on this board about what is really going on and at what point the financial crisis that Covid brought began to abate.

The point at which it really started to improve was mid June according to various simulations, including my own, that were part of the conversation at that time. There was general agreement that there would be a loss for the first half of the year, and we also learned from the AGM and the placing that cashflow and tax issues arose from the move to an export licence.

In other words we all knew most of the bad news before the RNS came. We also knew that profitability was likely in the second half of the year, although whether it would offset the loss in the first half would depend on uncertain factors such as the oil price, the Yelemes export licence and the rate of progress in MJF drilling. The market will learn of these improvements over the rest of the year's RNSs and I expect slow improvement in the SP up until Xmas as a result.

Multibagging news such as the deeps or JVs or leasing Drilly will come when (and if) they come. Some of yesterday's sales were from chancers who were in CASP on the off chance of a sudden upsurge on such news

The article that has appeared on this board today on the CASP results is highly misleading. The writer seems to think that the results have been adversely affected by an increase in selling expenses and finance costs which have offset the higher revenue.

While revenue and price per barrel rose during the first quarter, in the second quarter revenue per barrel was less than costs. The problem came on the revenue side, not the cost side.

The reason why selling costs and finance costs rose, on the other hand, was entirley due to a change in the basis of accounting as CASP which followed the granting of the export licence. In 2019 selling cost were not reported at all, and finance costs were reported on an entirely different basis.The two sets of accounts are therefore not comparable on an item by item basis. Rising costs were not the problem, falling revenue per barrel was.

This is very lazy financial reporting which will mislead any possible new investors in CASP. As the sp falls new speculative buyers may well be tempted. If you are out there, the article on the H1 interims today is absolute nonsense.

I'm with Ade on this one. Nothing has really changed. I thought the H1 financial results were if anything a little better than I had expected. As I said earlier, I am fairly confident that they are currently in profitable territory in H2, and they are taking a sensible cautious approach to their cashflow situation which should slowly improve. Drilling is the casualty here but workovers and acid treatments are proceeding. The Kazakh government seem to be cutting them some slack on their licence drilling obligations, although they are also being slow on the Yelemes export licence.

I am not expecting exciting news any minute, as nobody who has been with this share a while does. I am expecting slow progress and the possibility of an operating profit for 2020 as a whole. They have gone over from monthly to quarterly reporting. I am not sure what that means for the timing of the Q3 RNS, but I would hope sometime in October

Ah, it was a forecast without a timescale. I should have known. They are always very difficult to disprove
I think it was Ibyb who recently commented that the board was very quiet, and that were not even any narcissistic derampers around.

True, CC I also feel after our exchanges that the conversation has been pointless. Don't know why I do it really!

Fair point CC. I did say that it wouldn't drop to 2p and I got it wrong, although I think the timescale for your prediction that it would drop to 2p again was rather shorter than turned out to be the case.

I still maintain that CASP is currently profitable and is managing its cashflow position adequately.

CC They are not drilling so they have no costs there. They have got some workover costs and continuing acid treatment costs. They will have to pay for Drilly but that is also now less than expected. They have variously said that they are profitable above $30 to $35 for Brent and we have been well above that for the period since the end of June. The only way in which they will not be profitable in H2 is a second oil price crash. I am pretty confident that this will not happen, but of course as you say nothing is 100%

CC You claim to know what is going on with Drilly McBoatface on the basis of monthly costs dropping from $100k to $60K. You may be right, you may be wrong. Clearly you are right in saying that the disparity needs explaining but it is in fact just a guess.

You claim to know that the acid hasn't worked. There is so little information about the acid in the RNS that no reasonable conclusions can be drawn yet.

You imply that the oil price is falling when it is doing the opposite at present. Clearly the oil price is unstable at present, but it is as likely to rise as to fall.

This RNS simply tells us what most of us already thought likely - the COVID crisis has hit operations at CASP because of local lockdowns, and the cashflow crisis brought about by the drop in oil price has stopped drilling. Current operations are however profitable and the situation will improve in the second half of the year