Can an economy pick up from where it left off? On February 20, 2020 the market suddenly woke up to the possibility of COVID-19 causing significant disruption to the U.S. economy and over the next seven trading sessions the S&P 500 dropped more than 12% even as trading volume in the SPY shot up significantly as you can see from the chart below. The first phase of the decline occurred ...
Community spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, defined as the infection of a person without travel to a country like China or contact with someone who returned from one of the affected countries was confirmed last week in California and in the Pacific Northwest. Despite all the news from mainland China, Hong Kong, Iran and Italy, it does not look like the U.S. was very well prepared. In the first California ...
On April 29, 2018, T-Mobile US (TMUS) and Sprint Corporation (S), the third and fourth largest wireless carriers in the US, announced a definitive agreement to merge in an all stock deal. The two companies had tried to merge three times since 2014 before finally agreeing to combine in 2018. The ensuing battle to close the deal lasted almost two years with the final hurdle to the deal removed today. ...
The goal of the premium version of Inside Arbitrage is to provide subscribers with a set of tools that help with their investment process. I don’t often write a premium post unless I see an interesting opportunity. Sometimes I don’t write a post for more than six weeks and at other times it can be twice in the same week. This is one of those weeks and I wanted to ...
The energy industry is broadly divided into three components consisting of upstream companies that do the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, the midstream companies that transport and store the extracted hydrocarbons and the downstream companies that refine, process and sell the end products like gasoline. There is often significant overlap between these components and there are several energy companies that do all three. Over the last several ...
There are many ways to skin the merger arbitrage cat and I have used or have considered using four of these methods in the past including, 1. Buying the stock of the target company 2. Buying the stock and adding a protective put option for a deal where the spread is large and the risks are high 3. Buying call options to maximize returns but taking on timing risk 4. ...
I was an early adopter of Amazon Prime, an early Netflix subscriber and cut the cord more than a decade ago. Over the last ten years, I have not missed traditional TV at all and recently when I turned on the TV in a hotel room, I was immediately reminded why I cut the cord. With cord cutting on the rise, the unbundled bundle is finally upon us. In addition ...
In our last premium post we discussed a new feature where we are gathering 13F data from the SEC for a group of over 30 funds and are displaying how many of these funds hold certain positions in the Merger Arbitrage Tool (MAT). The deadline to file the 13F forms for Q2 2019 was August 14 and we captured the data for the last quarter shortly thereafter. It was interesting to ...
Over the last several weeks we have been working hard on a new feature for premium members that we are very excited to release today. We have started extracting 13F filing data for a group of over 30 funds that either specialize in merger arbitrage or use the strategy for a portion of their portfolio. We are using this data to show how many of these funds hold a specific ...
Over the last few weeks I have had several conversations with scientists that use Pacific Biosciences’ (PacBio) long-read gene sequencing product and/or Illumina’s short-read sequencing products as well with other industry insiders who are familiar with both companies as well as potential competitors. All of them felt that Illumina (ILMN) would benefit a lot from PacBio’s technology and that PacBio (PACB) would benefit from Illumina’s management. They also felt that ...
