Dana, production growth a certainty

I've just waded through (or perhaps I should say skipped through) about 300 posts in this thread. The usual knockabout tosh, for the most part. I still haven't bought (or even sold ;-)) Dana, though I remain reasonably interested.

However, I can't get comfortable with the way the stock trades and the way that punters seem happy to ramp it up and down and trade the range. Neither am I happy with the buying activities of Directors.....it isn't a real vote of confidence in my opinion to exercise fistfuls of options 20% below the market price and then encourage your fellow directors to ramp the price higher by buying token amounts of shares (£10-20k parcels is certainly token....unless the same directors keep on buying in those quantities).

Neither am I a fan of the idea that Dana will emphasise the North Sea even more by buying BP's cast-offs. They will either need to raise debt substantially to do so - or they will need to do a rights issues (as with Paladin).....or, in view of the interesting observation that:
"BP does have an eye on Muaretania - an aquisitive eye"
....perhaps they'll be persuaded to do an asset swap with BP, giving up their majority in Mauritania in exchange for North Sea fag-ends??

Question is: if Dana are forced to choose between "bread today" (North Sea assets) and "jam tomorrow" (Mauritania), then which would they choose??

And, if the answer is that they will want to do both, it seems clear they can't finance both the development of Mauritania AND sizeable acquisitions in the North Sea without calling on shareholders to stump up! ....and that, of course, would be an excellent reason to try to get the shareprice running up ahead of a rights to coincide with their results in Feb!

Any views?

Yours, still sceptically,

emptyend