The Tasgall Group

I recently subscribed to the NY Times’ Dealbook daily email service, and they have a really nice feature called Dealboard. The dealboard is in the emails every day, but I can’t seem to find it on the website anywhere (to be honest, I didn’t try that hard).

The image to the right is the Dealboard from October 5, which highlights the various takeover situations that they track.

The first one on the list is the takeover for Harrah’s (HET) by the Apollo group. The spread of $5.71 is how far the current market price ($75) is below the potential buyout price ($80 and change). The $5.71 spread works out to about a 7% difference, showing that the confidence in the buyout is certainly not as high as it could/should be.

If you were into arbitrage and thought you could get an edge in trading these acquisition targets, this is a pretty decent place to start. At the very least, it is good to keep on top of the acquisitions and how the market is reacting to them…

All the spreads here are positive (which may be by design) but there are a few cases out there where the spread is negative — implying that the market expects an even higher buyout offer sooner or later. That’s the case with one of my holdings NovaGold (NG) — Barrick Gold (ABX) is trying to buy it for $14.50 per share, but NG is currently trading at $15.79.

Someone has been eating my economy.

I love coming across interesting charts that just make you go, “Hmm…”, like the one I posted about median income.  Here is another “Hmm…” chart that seemed to fit the vibe of recent posts:

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I add a link to the blogroll for Bill Cara’s site.  I think you will find it an interesting addition to the “static”.  He has a uniquely insider view of things and often links you to the reports coming out of big financial institutions (the big money) that only clients normally see.  He also does an extensive weekly review of sectors and interesting stocks.

There are quite a few ways to look at inflation and the general inflation expectation of various markets. Most people think of CPI or Core CPI as “inflation”, or they look at interest rates or the price of gold. Perhaps more important than the official statistics is what inflation expectations are…

There’s an easy way to see what the market expectations currently are for inflation — look at the relative performance of inflation adjusted bonds versus normal bonds. The easiest way to look at this is with a chart of TLT:TIP. (more…)

I’m sure this information can be found in many places online, but I just got this via e-mail from TradingMarkets and found it to be a useful quick summary of what’s coming up this week. I’ve pasted it below and followed with my comments (brace yourselves, this is a very long post!!!):

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Despite the fact that my last discussion was received with a deafening silence, I’m going to make another go at it. If you feel the writing juices, post via a trackback your answer to the following query, what is your favorite underappreciated analysis technique? What makes it good, and why don’t others realize it? (more…)

Back in a previous post, I linked to a web page that will calculate the odds of a recession based on research by the Federal Reserve.

The inputs for the calculation are the yields for the 10 year bond, 3 month bond, and the Fed Overnight rate.  Unfortunately I’m too lazy to want to go plug those things in regularly, so I threw together a little script that would automatically download the rates and do the calculation for me.  I’ve created a new page on this blog that contains the script:  Recession Calculator.  I have also added the page to my Daily News Briefing.

It’s worth noting that this model does underestimate the real odds of a recession.  Also, all three rates are inverted right now.

Ok, so the definition of maudlin is “drunk enough to be emotionally silly”.  Not sure that really applies to John Mauldin but I couldn’t pass up the obvious similarity between the word and his name.  I’m a sucker for puns.  But my general purpose is served to use some sort of adjective with a negative spin.  Do I have negative thoughts about John Mauldin?  The jury is out.  But I wanted to talk about some interesting data collected about his newsletter that does little to shine a positive light on the man’s market opinions.  (more…)

Many, many people are talking about the Fed Funds Rate, but I have a feeling most don’t even know that the rate is not set by Bernanke or the FOMC… they set a “target” rate for the Fed’s open market activities.

You can see here that the number in practice does deviate from the target slightly on a day-to-day basis. Even though the target rate is 5.25% there are several days where the average rate was 5.31% or even 5.17%.

There’s nothing sinister or conspiratorial here, it’s just the fact that the Fed is in less control than everyone thinks. They are subject to some variance just like the rest of the markets…

To quote NowAndFutures.com: “The Federal Reserve Bank is a private company, authorized in 1913 by a Congressional Act called the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. In a very real sense, it outsourced the control of U.S. money and banking to bankers themselves.”