We haven’t written on one of the companies we follow as there wasn’t really a lot to write about. After one very profitable trade, and since that, we have it as a speculative buy at 28 cents and that has now doubled. But we believe drilling might already have started, and there could be another development driving the stock price higher, much higher perhaps…

As you can see, it has already recovered quite nicely, on the back of recovering oil prices and speculative interest. But developments are nearing.

Recapitulating, this company wholy or partly owns five different prospect in five different countries (Albania, Mongolia, Chile, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyztan). For detailed information we couldn’t find fault in this recent, rather detailed pdf presentation from the company.

In Kyrgyztan, the company has a $54M farm-out deal with Santos from Australia, a rather large boost to credibility. There is a lot of oil in the Fergana basin, production has been established since 1902. According to the Department of Energy of the US, 3B barrels of oil remain undiscovered there.

Scott Pickford, an independent engineering bureau, has evaluated the net prospect to Manas as $182M at an oil price of $35. So we can’t really say that the prospects for drilling are rather good, but of course, success is not guaranteed, hence our ‘speculative’ buy.

They have farm-in deals for their projects in Chile and Kyrgyzstan, but there could be another one for their Albanian properties, which they are the 100% owner off. That could really give a big boost to the share price, as their prospect there is just next to Europe’s largest on-shore oil field and independent reports from Gustavson has put a 3.0B barrels in place (P2) on the blocks Manas controls.

Share prices have been much higher in this company (as high as $6.4 in July 2007), and now that they’re moving forward (and the rising oil price also helps), things could really get interesting. Success is not guaranteed, but they have five very interesting properties putting at least some downside on the stock, while the upside could really be quite exiting…