Your friend also got a little (maybe a lot) lucky, given that yes oil has rebounded, but there aren't a lot of oil stocks that have quadrupled. He had to buy a highly leveraged, indebted company teetering on the brink of bankruptcy to get that return and that comes with great risk. Perhaps even more risk than one might see in PTK, but that's a debate for another time. At times like this, Warren Buffet's quote about the stock being a mechanism for transferring money from the impatient to the patient has a lot of value to me....or so I hope.