- Continental Resources' (CLR -5.6%) move in October 2014 to liquidate its insurance against an oil market crash just before prices collapsed wound up costing the company $1B this year, Bloomberg calculates.
- Believing the downturn would not last, CLR’s Harold Hamm liquidated all the company’s oil hedges, including contracts locking in prices for 2014 and 2016 production, reaping a one-time gain of $433M; if Hamm had been right and oil prices rebounded, CLR would have enjoyed the cash windfall from selling the hedges plus higher prices for its crude, but prices plunged instead.
- "He made the move thinking things are going to improve and they didn’t," Wunderlich's Jason Wangler says. "It was a calculated gamble and it didn’t pay off."