Down 65% at the open last week.
Very good example of what can and does very often happen.
The thing about buying stock in oil explorers before drilling news is that it's exactly as has been said here: a punt! It's a total gamble in every sense(apart from the fact that you're not technically gambling), because you really have no idea whether it will be good or bad news. You could say the same for trading any stock(that it's impossible to predict direction), but at least with the larger, more liquid stocks, you are able to use technical analysis, or even just a psychological number to manage your risk by setting stops.
For example, if you'd been out the day Desire opened down by over 60% and you had a stop at, say 85p, your stop would be triggered but your shares would have been sold at the best price available at the time. Just imagine buying £10k worth of shares one day and having that order triggered and losing £6.5k before you can even say "shit!".
You can set more complicated stops that would mean the order wouldn't be triggered below a certain price, but I'm just highlighting the dangers.
So great potential reward, but very high risk. If you take a look at the stock market bulletin boards you'll a lot of posts on these hyped up stocks' threads by retards basically hoping and praying that a situation will come good or that they'll get lucky. It's the wrong way to go about things in my opinion. They're all telling each other what they want to hear, and that's exactly how an opinion of a company comes about without any basis in reality.
Also, without wanting to seem rude, forget the person you trust, the opinion of others counts for absolutely nothing in the financial markets.