That isn't really enough capital, but I can see why you're attracted to these oil explorers with that money. It's possible to double your money in a day in some cases, but then again it's also possible to lose a lot of it.

What makes people money from the markets is money management. Say with these stocks you have £1000 to play with... and forget about trading costs for a minute. What a lot of people do with these oil stocks is take a punt, wake up one day and see the share price has risen 10% in a day, so they end up quickly taking the profit. So they now have £1100. But what they don't think about is what they will do if it heads the other way. In most cases they'll sit on the loss, hoping for it to recover, but there's chance it might never. Then they would just sell for, say, a £300 loss. Not a big deal really... it was a punt. But they're now down to £800.

Then next punt they take gets them another 10%. So they sell, pleased with the quick profit, and end up with £880. But what happens if they have another loser? They could end up with about £750 after the next punt. I think a lot of these people just gradually see their capital disappear in this way because they don't have a strategy.

What you need to be doing is looking for set-ups where you are risking x to make 2 or 3x. But to do that you need to cut losers and run winners, which sounds simple, but using your own cash will soon bring out the emotions that stop you from doing this! I really think all traders who make consistent money(that's different to investing) have a strict strategy, almost like a professional gambler, where they'd be risking 2-5% of capital on a trade for the chance of making 2-5 times that risk. With oil explorers, you really can't use these kind of strategies if you're trading on expected drilling results.