The oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has damaged BP's reputation will they manage to avoid a share collapse to 350p.?



472p to buy this morning.

MRSI - you're just adding more indicators that are all derived from the same base data. A pointless exercise.

Take a look at the 3 month chart you'll see the RSI trend clear as day.

Support, Resistance, Volume, Trends and RSI Trend is all you need. Everything else serves to muddy the waters and make a simple job look complicated.

Oh, and what are the odds of Clubby's short dark stranger turning out to be a ladyboy?

I speak English and Thai but do not understand gobbledegook

From the Telegraph

Exxon or Shell should buy BP for 88bn, says analyst

BP'S share price fell by a further 2pc, after a prominent City expert suggested it should be bought by US rival Exxon Mobil in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Fred Lucas, an energy analyst at JP Morgan Cazenove, speculated that Exxon or Shell could swoop on the beleagured British oil giant for approximately 88bn. Exxon is the most financially strong oil company, he said, adding that it could make a cash and stock offer while spinning off $50bn (33bn) of refining and marketing assets.

"We must emphasise," Mr Lucas adds in the note, "that this is our idea and it is only an idea."

The mooted 473p offer price is 30pc less than the 123bn the company was worth before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded killing 11 men and triggering a catastrophic leak on April 20.

However, it is substantially more than the current 57bn market value of the oil giant, which has slipped from Britain's biggest company to the fifth behind Shell, HSBC, Vodafone and GlaxoSmithKline.

BP has already spent $2.65bn on the clean-up and committed $20bn to environmental compensation. The cost of additional lawsuits, pay-outs to Gulf Coast residents and punitive fines are likely to add many more billions to these bills.

BP's share price slipped 2pc to 302.9p yesterday, at one point dipping below the symbolic 300p mark, after weather forecasters warned that an area of tropical depression would turn into Hurricane Alex. The bad weather is already hampering efforts to capture oil coming from the leak and operations to clean up the growing slick off the southern US coast.

Oil skimming ships were sent back to Louisiana amid strong winds and big waves - although the storm itself will not hit the affected region. On Monday, BP said its plan to increase oil being captured has been delayed, but current equipment piping oil to the surface remains in place.

However, operations continued nearer to shore with a plan to remove up to 800 unhatched turtle eggs to protect the sea creatures from the effects of the oil.

Earlier in the day, a Facebook group calling on people to boycott oil from BP service stations was removed from the social networking website but later reinstated. It grew in size to almost 750,000 members after people thought the site was being censored.

Although BP claims it has only noticed a slight downturn in US sales, local petrol retailers claim the company is planning to give them financial relief of up to $70m in total.

The head of a trade group that represents distributors of BP gasoline in the US said the company is informing outlets that they will be getting cash, reductions in credit card fees and help with more national advertising. John Kleine of the BP Amoco Marketers Association said: "They are going to get a cheque. They're being given these dollars for use in their business."

When they come, they come in threes ( yes the good news ) ......

from the Financial Times ..............

Anadarko Approved Of Key Aspects Of BP's Well Design

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) approved several aspects of BP PLC's (BP, BP.LN) designs for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig involved in the catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the Financial Times reports Tuesday on its website, citing senior executives at both companies.

And share price keeps rising now 326.50p +24.30p 8.78%

Closed remainder of yesterday's long @ 328 for a stonking few.

Now flat BP - have a small and tentative long BAY opened this morning and a reasonably sized short AGK from Thursday of last week. All with comfortable stops and limits set.

I have a small knowledge on odds compilingthe chance on Exxon on Shell taking them out is long oddscertainly way higher than the 2s on [1/2-4/9] 4-73 would bring you
BPs liabilities and legal pay-outs will be immense and go on for yearsand with no insurance American Courts will milk the situation to max
Tony Hayward has put it in writing to Obama.. Saying BP doesn't have enough money in the world to clean up the Gulf of Mexicoand if the odd Hurricane comes along and Tony has to clean up the rest of the World the price could be worth less than a litre of petrol in minutesfor all those that are having a punt on an oversold and a chartyou got balls!!!I like odds in other placesbut good call up until now my Palestinian friend

Why don't they get the prison inmates out cleaning on day release, maybe because someone is on a nice little earner supplying all labour.

ClubbyTony wanted ithis words in 2007:-

Soon after taking over in 2007, BP's newly appointed chief executive told an audience of business students at Stanford University that he thought too many people at the company were "trying to save the world". Tony Hayward's comments were intended to set the tone for his tenure at the helm of Britain's third largest company

What he was trying to say wasmore people at the company are now going to try and fcuk the world up

Save the world, why when Iran go full nuclear there will be no need to worry about plastic carrier bags, and the like.

Go on BP my son up 8.3% get it capped move on and fuck the Yanks, give them 0
and drag it out in court for 10 years.

Bless her, the wife is bored waiting for Clubby

Clubby

Shit. Just realised your misses kicked my underpants under your sofa last week and I left them there. Could you please ask her to send them back?

Ta.

G

You wish

;-)

UP 3.10% on the US at $28.56
bouncing from earlier low of $28.20

link to BP. futures on the US .............. BP. futures

and currently $28.96 and performing far more strongly than rest of us market

is now moving higher after the slight drop at the start with the market above 320p again

Light futures

'Whale' Supertanker to Skim Oil in Gulf*

(Newser) A massive supertanker is heading for the Gulf, newly outfitted to skim oil out of the waterin theory. The boat, appropriately named A Whale, is 10 stories tall and 372 yards long, making it the largest ship to ever attempt an oil cleanup job. Its owner, Nobu Su, CEO of Taiwan Maritime Transport, says it's been outfitted to roll across the Gulf seeping up oil like a lawn mower cutting the grass. But the procedure is completely untested.

video .......... 'Whale' Supertanker to Skim Oil in Gulf*

Fighting to go up in a sea of red

from Money week -- David Stevenson -- Jun 28, 2010

Have BP shares hit rock bottom yet?

BP. What a complete nightmare.

The Deepwater Horizon accident has been a terrible catastrophe for everyone in the Gulf of Mexico.

But now that shares in BP (LSE: BP/) are crashing and the company has cancelled its dividend, a great many other people are also feeling at least some impact from the disaster. There's even talk of BP filing for bankruptcy.

So what does it all mean for investors? And should you still be thinking about buying BP shares?

Things are getting no easier for BP
If only I'd listened to the boss. Just over two weeks ago, MoneyWeek's editor-in-chief Merryn Somerset Webb warned that: Buying BP now is incredibly risky.

That was when the investment world was full of the 'it's fallen so far it must be time to buy BP' brigade. I should know: I was one of them. After all, BP's shares had plunged from 6.50 since the Gulf leak was announced in April, to just 4. Almost 50bn had been wiped off the company's market cap. Surely all the bad news had to be baked in, we thought.

But as we now know, it wasn't. BP has since fallen another 20% or so. It hit a 14-year low at one point on Friday. And the chances are that this has hurt your portfolio. Even if you don't own BP shares directly, you almost certainly do so as part of a pension fund. Since late April, the fall in the oil giant's shares has accounted for well over a third of the near-12% dip in the FTSE 100 index.

On top of that, the company has cancelled its first-quarter dividend (which was due to be paid last week), and suspended the next two payouts. So now there'll be no income for shareholders for the rest of 2010. That's not healthy for the nation's retirement pot BP used to provide 1 in every 7 of UK equity dividend income.

The US government is the key factor
President Barack Obama got onto BP's case almost immediately after the disastrous chain of events began. We won't get too tied up in all the politics here. But dare I say it, had this been a bank in trouble, I reckon the attitude would have been very different. Politicians would have plied it with taxpayers' cash and talked about "cleaning up the mess first before worrying about what caused it". But because it's an oil company well, enough said.

Meanwhile, oil is still spewing into the Gulf, although BP is now talking about plugging the leak by mid-July. Already, the clean up costs will be huge. BP has set aside $20bn for starters, and the bill has now risen to $2.65bn. To make matters worse, the hurricane season is about to start. That can only make a desperately difficult job even harder.

But the key factor is how big a penalty the US government stings BP with. Again, that's anyone's guess. But it's likely to be a much bigger figure than the clean-up costs alone. And it's likely to get larger the longer the hole takes to plug.

What does it mean for shareholders?
Add it all up, and what's the bottom line for shareholders now? By the end of last week, the panic was really setting in and not just in the stock market. The value of bonds issued by BP fell to their lowest level ever, while the cost of protecting against a default hit new highs.

Suggestions were rife that BP wouldn't have enough cash to pay all its costs without selling off some assets or selling more shares. The latter more supply of stock would damage the share price. Indeed, some pundits are saying there's even a chance of BP going bankrupt, or at least, that it could file for bankruptcy to get 'protection from creditors'. Under this scenario, BP would be able to keep going in some form, but would also be able to sidestep many of the claims being made against it.

This would be fraught with complications and I won't try to take them on here. But remember that BP wasn't at all troubled financially before this all began. It was a healthy business that churned out almost 18bn in cash flow from its operations last year.

Michael Block, chief equities strategist at Phoenix partners, told the FT on Friday that BP had "ample resources and assets." But even so, "the spectre of voluntary bankruptcy or some other restructuring for one or some of BP's entities in North America cannot be overlooked... nothing is impossible."

The real issue is that, if pushed too hard by the US government, BP may find that some form of bankruptcy filing ends up being the least worst option. We're not there yet, and it would be a legal minefield it's hardly a 'get out of jail free' card. But suffice to say, it would be yet more bad news for shareholders.

Bankruptcy would be a nightmare for the US government too it would kill the golden goose. Though whatever the politicians were saying over the weekend, we can never trust them not to opt for short-term populism over long-term gain. Clearly the political situation won't really get any clearer until the well is plugged.

So is it time to take a gamble yet?
Scary stuff. So do all these risks mean you should avoid taking a punt on BP, even at these levels?

Well, let's make one thing clear first. As my colleague John Stepek has said if you do buy BP now, you need to be well aware of exactly what you're getting into.

It's now a very high-risk play rather than a 'safe' dividend provider. So you should only punt money that you can afford to lose. Don't touch it with your long-term investment cash.

But if you are prepared to gamble, when should you buy in?

The time to get into a troubled stock is often just when everyone else is throwing in the towel. And despite the dreadful run of headlines (not to mention the share price crash), that's not happened with BP yet. Two-thirds of City analysts are still bullish, according to Bloomberg data.

It's worth watching how the analysts respond to more bad news. If they lose faith, and switch to sell en masse, that could be the moment to buy. But for now, there are still too many people who view BP as a huge buying opportunity for me to feel happy about taking a second shot at calling the bottom on this share.