Monday – Merger Mania Continues
by phil - August 30th, 2010 8:22 am
It's another busy Monday for M&A activity.
SNY announced a $18.5Bn CASH offer for GENZ ($69/share), INTC buy's INNNY's wireless unit for $1.4Bn in CASH and DELL and HPQ are still in a bidding war over PAR (and HPQ thinks their own shares are so cheap they are buying back $10Bn worth of them). The biggest winner in this weekend's acquisition game is – ME! I live in northern NJ and, with the merger of CAL and UAUA going through, Continental is forced to diffuse some of their concentration at Newark airport and that ends up giving LUV 18 slots, bringing some much-needed additional competition to Newark, which has been pretty much dominated by Continental for years. LUV is a great buy at $11.13 and a fun way to play is the Jan $10/11 bull call spread at .60, selling the Jan $10 puts for .55, which is net .05 on the $1 spread with a 1,900% upside and your worst-case scenario is you own LUV at net $10.05 – what's not to LUV?
Speaking of diffused concentration, the Glenn Beck rally was a bit of a disappointment with just 87,000 people showing up (Fox had a permit for 300,000 and keeps using that number as if that's how many came while Beck himself has been claiming between 300,000 and 650,000 were there and Michele Backmann (R-Minn) claims it was the biggest rally ever held in Washington, with no fewer than 1M people in attendance). This has now backfired on Beck, Palin and the Tea Party as a "show of strength" becomes a show of apathy (to the people who can count, anyway) - it probably would have been smarter to hold the rally next weekend but Fox wanted to time the rally for the start of Jon Stewart's vacation, although it didn't stop him from commenting in absentia (where I hear Jon has a lovely bungalow). For a more "fair and balanced" view of the rally, see the very nice coverage from Reason TV.
During an interview on "Fox News Sunday," which was filmed after Saturday's rally, Beck claimed that Obama "is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim – People aren't recognizing his version of Christianity," Beck added. Beck's attacks represent a continuing attempt to characterize Obama as a radical, an approach…