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I received multiple emails last week about the recently announced acquisition of fracking company Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) by Exxon Mobil (XOM). We discussed the potential deal in an April 2023 mid-month update titled The Mother Fracker Is In Play. The article discussed the results of our analysis of 750 pre-merger rumors or “deals in the works” (DITW) as we like to call them. Excerpts from that article are given below for folks who would prefer not to login and read that article:
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).
Analysis of Deals-in-the-Works
We started tracking “potential” deals more than six years ago and built a tool for premium subscribers to see which of these rumored deals eventually came to fruition and which ones failed.