hiyas and welcome to the board.
First off , when you say negative, are you talking about negative coments from this board and others? If so then you need to look within your own DD of the company. You cant base a stock / stock performance from a few message boards. Many people have thier own reasoning for dogging a stock, most of them are looking for better entry points. same goes from the hype side, looking for better exit points.
To the point of your question:
If you have done proper DD you will find within that DD some good and some bad.
The biggest thing that is overlooked is Growth over Growth.
Amongst your DD you probably came across "life expetancy of wells" 10 years. If you break that down to understandable terms, you find the real potential of the company. Each new well that comes online compounds onto the growth stemming from each previous well. This is limitless growth compounding on top of growth for a minimum of 10 years. That alone is worth investing in.
The second biggest thing to look at is current talk of future presidential candidates. Both candidates are talking about changes in the position of american oil and looking at NG as a means to restructure that position. HTOG isnt necesarilly in the spot light directly, but indirectly will be affected positively from the spinoffs of added tax incentives, drilling incentives as well as exploration incentives.
those 2 things enticed me to HTOG as a long play on a riskier stock. Im vested in energy on a bigger scope about 4% of my portfolio which HTOG is about a quarter percent of that 4%. My long position is 9 years. I will be taking off the top within intervals of 6 months, and yearly from here.
On the negative side is the management. there are known issues with management as to if they can come down to the investors level or only looking to line thier own pockets. Im well aware that thats a possibility as well as all investors within HTOG should realize. Due to this, I do re evaluate my position with each news report as well as each 10Q, mostly the year end audited.
As far as your question about given a chance to start over if i would or wouldnt invest with HTOG. In a heartbeat i would take this chance again and hope I run across another stock like this in the future that plays into the political tensions as well as the long term payoffs.
Where this stock goes from here is based on management now, growth over growth will move the PPS , thats a given, but how management deals with that movement will directly affect how far it goes. Most probably know what im meaning with this but if now I will spell it out. If they R/S or increase A/S to 2 bil or 2.5 bil etc. vs a share buy back with no additional A/S from this point, those are things im looking for from management to determine if this remains a viable play or not.
Hope that helps you in your deciding factors about HTOG
happy trading