Harvesting Venezuelan Oil – The Bull Case for HNR

(April 4th, 2012) With crude sitting at $105 and change, oil & gas exploration companies with undervalued prospects have been all the rage. Therefore, its not often you find the stock of an oil company in the midst of an M&A transaction sitting squarely in the 50% off bin.  Yet that is exactly the case with Harvest Natural Resources (NYSE: HNR).

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EGY : The $7 bet on the next Persian Gulf

(Feb 14th, 2012)  Every so often it’s important to review one’s own biggest trading mistakes. My second worst trading error of the past six months occurred in January, when I got long an expensive, controversial oil name, Cobalt Energy (NYSE: CIE). Cobalt started out life as a Goldman Sachs’ backed driller in the Gulf of Mexico, and built a tidy portfolio of value-added offshore drilling. In late December of last year, Cobalt’s stock took off, moving from $10 a share to around $15, on word that its’ holdings in offshore Angola, where it was completing the Cameia-1 appraisal well, had potentially struck a a monstrous find.

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Qihoo 360 : See-No-Evil, Hear-No-Evil

Remember the 1980s oil & gas partnerships? Large E&P firms would pocket investor’s cash to shell out for leases, acrage, and the assorted equipment necessary to drill. The sky-high upfront leasing costs made sense only to investors with graphs prediction ever-rising energy prices. At the time, such pie-in-the-sky numbers looked like consensus. It was only when oil prices collapsed that in retrospect the O&G partnerships, as construed as an asset class, looked foolish. The losses were so steep, and the damage so widespread, that it took more than a decade before the Wall Street underwriting machine was able to lure the marks (er, clients) back into the business.

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LB Acquisitions LLC Increases Cash Portion of Offer to Acquire Caliper Technologies Corp.

Thursday February 13, 2:57 pm ET

NEW YORK, Feb. 12 /Businesswire/ — LB Acquisitions LLC (“LBA”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Little Bear Investments LLC (“LB”), announced today that it has increased the cash portion of its’ offer to acquire Caliper Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: CALP) (hereinafter referred to as “Caliper”) to $4.50 per share.

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Proposal to Acquire Caliper Technologies Corp.

Wednesday February 12, 9:00 am ET

NEW YORK, Feb. 12 /Businesswire/ — LB Acquisitions LLC (“LBA”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Little Bear Investments LLC (“LB”), announced today that it submitted a proposal to acquire Caliper Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: CALP) (hereinafter referred to as “Caliper”) to its’ Board of Directors for $4.15 per share of Common Stock. The proposal was delivered yesterday, and is subject to various conditions, including LBA successfully obtaining adequate financing to consummate the transaction and the completion by LBA of satisfactory due diligence.

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New Corporate Name & Direction

Tuesday January 28, 8:05 am ET

NEW YORK, Feb. 6 /Businesswire/ — Little Bear Investments LLC (“Little Bear”, or the “Company”) announced today that it has changed its name from Zackfoot Investments LLC. Formerly the Company was known for investments in mainly privately held companies with a slant towards New York-area technology businesses.

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” Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration. ” Andrew Carnegie