Who says stock market players can’t fall into a barrel of manure and come out smelling like a rose?

Quite miraculously, speculators stricken by Synsorbitis, a disease that caused an unsightly rash on their portfolios, have been cured.

In fact, they’ve been laughing all the way to the bank. As recently as six months ago, Calgary-based Synsorb Biotech (SYB-TSX) was hanging by a thread on life support after confessing that development of its last-resort diarrhea drug had been halted. The shares were virtually worthless.

If you were on sabbatical for the past six months on a remote Caribbean island, out of reach of quotes, you could have returned home at the end of May to find Synsorb missing from your portfolio and replaced by a newcomer, Hawker Resources (HKR-TSX).

The transformation of Synsorb from diarrhea to natural gas has produced the hottest TSX stock over $1 year to date, winning over the skeptics (including this columnist).

Since taking over the shell of Synsorb, Hawker has soared like a hawk and recently busted out on financing news to its high of $3.80.

That’s a whopping 458-per-cent gain that has put Synsorb shareholders back in the game.

Not bad for a company that, in its previous incarnation, struck out mightily in clinical testing with its two main drugs, for treatment of diarrhea and E. coli.

Hawker has done it with a proven blueprint from the oilpatch.

Hawker commanded immediate respect by naming an oilpatch star, David Tuer, the former CEO of PanCanadian Energy, as the mastermind behind the new company.

The stock immediately shot up, but Tuer has not rested on his early laurels. Unlike his predecessor, Synsorb’s tub-thumping CEO David Cox, Tuer has a sound reputation for producing results in short order, which goes a long way in explaining the vote of confidence he has received from investors.

That other David, Cox, was “very excited” in press releases but, alas, the news was seldom that exciting.

Since Hawker was launched on Jan. 6, the company has proven to be a mover and shaker, having issued eight news releases, none of which has quoted the CEO as being “very excited.”

Hawker has gained a solid foothold in the industry by acquiring an option on 50 per cent of the assets of Southward Energy, recently securing $45 million in financing from its first public offering and a $28-million credit facility, and Tuer has surrounded himself with an impressive management team, including his former PanCanadian sidekick Terry Schmidtke.

That’s a pretty sound foundation on which to build. Of course, Hawker is a long way away from proving itself as a major player and should be treated as a speculative play.

Still, the Hawker story is enough to make you swear off biotechs and other hyped plays in the market and bet on the winning jockeys in the oilpatch, who almost always wind up in the winner’s circle.

* THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET: Peter Linder, once one of the biggest fans of Gauntlet Energy (GAU-TSX), has lost all faith in the oilpatch’s biggest bust this year.

“I think it’s worthless,” quips Linder, senior energy strategist with DeltaOne Capital Partners.

While he was an analyst with Research Capital last year, Linder recommended Gauntlet Energy when the shares traded near an all-time high of $9.50.

The stock recently traded at 29 cents as the one-time darling of junior oil and gas plays has fallen apart at the seams, riddled by debt and horrendous production and exploration results.

Linder points the finger at Gauntlet management.

“Frankly, in hindsight, I think it was incompetence on the part of the management team,” said Linder when asked about the root cause of the company’s sudden fall from grace. “I think the Street wasn’t properly informed about what was going on. “I spoke to management on a regular basis. I was told that production was holding up very well, so I believed them. Not that they lied to me – but something sounds fishy there. It’s a very sad story.”

Linder said he unloaded Gauntlet from the DeltaOne Energy Fund at $5.65 and has since “shorted the stock several times” within the hedge fund.

* SAGE WORDS: “The oil business is 95 per cent luck. You can be correct as hell and still not win. There were some very good people, much better geologically than I was, who came out here (oilpatch) and it just didn’t fly. It’s just been a fortunate thing.”

– Oilpatch legend Smilin’ Jack Gallagher on his success (in The Blue-Eyed Sheiks, by Peter Foster)



HOT ALBERTA STOCK: WI-LAN
WIN-TSX $2.73
Up $1.03 (+60.6%) on 1,955,200 shares (for week ending May 30).
Hard to figure, but it seems speculators still have a healthy appetite for some of the trendy plays of the tech boom days. Calgary wireless company Wi-LAN led the cavalry charge of small-cap techs with a robust breakout, helped by a couple of news hits about minor deals in India and China and anticipation of financials that were to be released on June 3. The shares, which once traded in the $90 range, have tripled since last October.



COLD ALBERTA STOCK: BOW VALLEY ENERGY
BVX-TSX $1.55
Down 32 cents (-17.1%) on 1,133,100 shares (for week ending May 30).
Shareholders weren’t the only ones unimpressed by Bow Valley’s dry hole in its costly high-impact play in the North Sea that was deemed non-commercial. The day after the grim news, Canaccord Capital analyst Gord Currie slashed his target price from $3 to $2 and his rating from speculative buy to buy.