It would be Harold Hamm.The morning of June 14,shortly after seeing Hart Energy's breaking news alert about Hamm bidding to take Continental Resources Inc.private,I received a text.Someone had replied to a Twitter post about the news,commenting,"Wonder what he's seeing."Without knowing more details yet,I replied,"Wall Street doesn't want oil and gas producers using equity to grow,so why be public?"Getting into the Securities and Exchange Commission filing,I read Hamm's letter to employees.Yep,that's his point.It would be Harold Hamm who would go first to tell Wall Street,"Nope."When he took his already 40-year-old Continental public in 2007,it had found a game-changing treasure in the Bakken Shale and needed access to large amounts of capital to develop it."At that time,the public market rewarded companies for both growth and performance,"he wrote.Today,though,Wall Street doesn't want oil and gas producers to spend money;they want to harvest it instead.The ever-fewer public operators out there,Hamm wrote,"is illustrative of a lack of support from the public market,and we believe there is a resulting underappreciation of Continental."
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