Merger Masters

This is interviews, which I normally do not love, because interviews let people tell the flattering version. It mostly gets away with it because merger arbitrage leaves receipts. A deal closed or it did not.

Twenty one people, eighteen arbitrageurs and three chief executives, walk through how they size up an announced deal, and then most of them walk through the ones that blew up on them, which is the useful half. What comes out of all of it is an obsession with the calendar. An arb's return is annualized, so the same spread is a great trade over two months and a bad one over fourteen, and almost nobody outside that world thinks about time at all. A cabin that comes online in March and a cabin that comes online in August are not the same asset. One catches a season and one misses it.