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Message: Some Thoughts on Crescent Point

I'm trying to figure out what Crescent Point Energy's end strategy is today. When Crescent Point was created the strategy was to grow the company to thousands of barrels of oil and then to sell the company. Scott Saxberg and Paul Colborne made statements to this effect in the first couple of years of the company's existance. Then the strategy changed whereby Crescent Point morphed into an energy trust. It grew tremendously by acquisition and by developing oil pools and a high dividend was maintained. Shareholders still were given the dream of a high dividend with capital appreciation. Today Crescent Point is a hybrid. While it is a corporation it still resembles an Energy Trust with a high dividend payout (unchanged from when it was an energy trust) along with the issuing of shares to buy production and land with future drilling locations. But what has happened to the idea of fattening up Crescent Point and selling it which was the strategy in the beginning? Right now Crescent Point has over 7,000 possible drilling locations which would keep it busy for 16 years, and the company is valued at over $16 billion dollars. Is Crescent Point getting to the point where it will be too expensive for another oil company to buy it? What is the point in having 16 years of drilling locations with over 7,000 wells for Crescent Point today unless it is to make the company attractive to Imperial Oil or Shell for a buy out? Or has Crescent Point management changed their game plan again, in that they want to grow Crescent Point into one of the largest oil companies in Canada. If this is the new plan then it carries with it the risk of becoming slow and immobile in the energy field. If management continues to buy boe's and increase the number of shares every quarter at some point they may have to reduce the dividend in order to keep growing as the DRIP may not be able to sustain the dividend indefinately.

Another thought that I have is whether management consciously keeps the share price in the $40.00 range so that more retail investors can acquire the shares. Everytime the shares get to around the mid 40's, management sells 20 million more shares in a bought deal which lowers the share price. Is management specifically doing this so that the share price doesn't go to the $60 or $70 dollar range which would be prohibitive for most investors to include Crescent Point in their portfolios? Or is the fact that Crescent Point's share price stays in the $40 dollar range due to the result of it's constant issuing more shares to finance it's acquisitions? I don't know.

Why doesn't Crescent Point management issue more shares at the end of each of the next two quarters and, instead of buying new oil pools with thousands of more drilling locations, use the money to totally pay off Crescent Point's $1.5 billion dollar debt? Mark Carney is constantly telling the public to reduce our personal debt. So why doesn't Crescent Point totally eliminate it's debt? It could do this. Why are they paying 3% or 4% or 5% interest on their $1.5 billion dollar debt when they could eliminate the debt altogether? The result would be that the share price would go up for the shareholders and the company would be more valuable.

Does anyone have any idea of how long Cresent Point can go on at it's present rate of acquisitions before their model stops working properly? Something to think about.

Cheers; Scott

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