THE BIG QUESTION IS:
Does the Toronto Stock Exchange reach 10,000 before Talisman drops below 30?
Eric Reeves [March 22, 2000]
Smith College ereeves@sophia.smith.edu
Northampton, MA 01063
For the seventh trading session out of the last eight, Talisman Energy was down—today by $.45, or roughly 8% during this dismal stretch. And it hasn’t moved up significantly in more than ten trading sessions. At the same the TSE moved up smartly (238 points), on vigorous volume, to close at 9890, 100 points from the magic 10,000 mark!
Patience is a signal virtue for market investors. But how dreary it must be for Talisman investors to be missing out on all the fun and excitement of this milestone—to be burdened with monotonous talk of “dot-com bubble bursting,” and the dreary insistence that technology stocks are soon to come down (has anyone ever seen more resilience than the NASDAQ has shown over the last year in pushing toward 5000!?).
But such talk is as good as it gets, I’m afraid. Maybe Hill & Knowlton will let old Jim Buckee out of his PR-dictacted regime of silence long enough to shout again that “TLM is a screaming buy!” But he’ll be the only one screaming. And the thought that a $250 million dollar buy-back can’t get him a few cents in increased share price might gag even JB.
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The essential fact of the matter remains unchanged: there is simply no denying Sudan as the essential issue governing Talisman share price. Human agony on this scale—once visible, and tied so decisively to identifiable corporate behavior—will never go away. Never, never, never—-
What Talisman has described as “background noise,” supposedly to fade into oblivion, will become the ever louder voice of righteous anger. The suffering of the people of Sudan will, in Macbeth’s harrowing words, “plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against the deep damnation”—the damnation that is obscene corporate greed trading out human lives and welfare for profit.
If patience is a virtue for investors, it is the very essence of a divestment campaign: the patience to hunt down, make visible, and attach unsustainable opprobrium to every single share of Talisman Energy in Canada or the US. And at the close of day, if Buckee and Talisman decide to stay in Sudan, $30. shares of Talisman will seem like found money.