Fri 6 Oct 2006
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.