We started tracking pre-merger announcements or rumored deals in 2017 and called them “deals in the works” (DITW). One of the advantages of collecting data over multiple years is that you can check for patterns and revisit your analysis to see if any conclusions you came to, continued to persist with a larger data set.
I have been told that DITW is a potentially lucrative area that I am not paying enough attention to, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Not only have we looked for patterns in the data multiple times, we have run several experiments by writing code as well as by manually combing through SEC filings to look for nuggets of information to see if they could predict which DITW situation would turn into actual deals with a definitive merger agreement (DMA).