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China Draws Red Lines
China warned the U.S. to stay clear of “red lines” after a fragile trade truce.
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Your Daily Dose of Market & Career Clarity
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🎯 In this issue:
Banana Bits: Finance headlines that actually matter
Market Summary: Amazon fuels rally, $40B merger fails to impress
What’s Ripe / Rotten: The tastiest and most disgusting stocks
Technical Trip: Interview Question with Citi
Deal Dispatch: M&A, IPOs, and other transactions
The Daily Poll: See how you stack up
Market Snapshot
📉 Banana Bits
China warned the U.S. to stay clear of “red lines” after a fragile trade truce.
South Korea’s inflation spike could push the BOK to keep rates on hold longer.
Cr*ptos tanked as October’s mass liquidations scared off buyers.
Fed’s Cook says job market worries now outweigh inflation risks.
Falling cardboard box sales hint at a weak holiday shopping season.
Tesla’s European sales are sliding again.. another rough month.
U.S. manufacturing shrank for the eighth straight month as demand stayed soft.
Your upper hand
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This isn’t a regurgitation of publicly available information or a lengthy list of things you and your boss(es) already know. No, every data point and insight comes from SRS Acquiom, the private-target M&A expert. This data draws on more than 2,200 private-target deals, valued at more than $505 billion, that closed between 2019 and 2024. This is invaluable deal terms intelligence from a proprietary private-target dataset you won’t find elsewhere.
Trends in valuations and earnouts, impacts of heightened due diligence, the prevalence of walk-away indemnity structures: It’s all here. So, if you’re looking for a ticket to knowing what’s market on private target deals—the kind of stuff that makes your clients and bosses take notice—this is the closest you’re going to get.
Market Recap
An M&A Not Favoured by Investors
Monday trading was a bit mixed as investors pushed the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index higher, with gains as high as 0.4%.
Bloomberg’s Basket for the so-called Magnificent Seven soared 1.2%, closing at a fresh all-time high. On the other hand, the S&P 500 closed for a modest gain of 0.2%.
The bullish momentum in yesterday’s trading is mainly driven by Amazon's rally after signing a $38 billion deal with OpenAI.
With the broader stock market pushing higher highs, some deals are not spared.
Investors didn’t like the $40 billion price merger of Kimberly-Clark Corp and Kenvue Inc. Kimberly-Clark said the combination would create a company with $32 billion in revenue and allow it to surpass Unilever Plc to become the second-biggest seller of health and wellness products after Procter & Gamble Co.
But it also saddles the company with potential legal concerns down the road. Analyst from RBC Capital Markets noted that “Kimberly-Clark acquiring Kenvue was something we thought would be probable, but the timing is earlier than we expected.”
What's Ripe
Cipher Mining Inc. (CIFR) 22.0%
CIFR surged 22% after the company, which develops data centers to perform Bitcoin mining, reported a narrower-than-expected third-quarter loss
It would also provide space and power for Amazon Web Services' AI workloads under a $5.5 billion, 15-year lease agreement.
Kenvue Inc. (KVUE) 12.3%
KVUE jumped 12% to $16.14 after Kimberly-Clark agreed to buy the Tylenol maker in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $48.7 billion, including debt.
Kimberly-Clark will pay $21.01 a share, based on Kenvue’s closing price from Friday.
What's Rotten
UniQure N.V. (QURE) 49.3%
QURE tumbled 49% after the biotech company reported a likely regulatory setback for one of its gene therapies.
The Food and Drug Administration no longer agrees that the data from Phase I/II studies of uniQure’s therapy AMT-130 is adequate to support a Biologics License Application.
Beyond Meat, Inc. (BYND) 16.0%
Shares tumbled after the company delayed its Q3 earnings release to Nov. 11 from Nov. 4 to finalize a “material” impairment charge tied to certain long-lived assets.
🧠 Technical Trip
Interview Q&A from Citi
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📚 Lesson from the Library
🎥 Sales & Trading: Inside the Markets
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🦈 Deal Dispatch
M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions
Electric plane maker Beta Technologies raised $1B in its IPO.
Goldman’s CEO says there’s a “tremendous” M&A backlog waiting to pop.
WeRide plans to raise $308M through a Hong Kong listing.
Starbucks is selling 60% of its China unit to Boyu in a $4B deal.
Steve Cohen’s Point72 tripled its stake in Lionsgate to 5.1%.
Point72 is also launching a new equity unit as assets soar past $42B.
Kimberly-Clark is buying Kenvue (Tylenol’s maker) in a $48.7B move.
Banana Brain Teaser
Previous
Working simultaneously at their respective constant rates, Machines A and B produce 800 nails in x hours. Working alone at its constant rate, Machine A produces 800 nails in y hours. In terms of x and y, how many hours does it take Machine B, working alone at its constant rate, to produce 800 nails?
Answer: xy/ (x - y)
Today
After driving to a riverfront parking lot, Bob plans to run south along the river, turn around, and return to the parking lot, running north along the same path. After running 3.23 miles south, he decides to run for only 50 minutes more. If Bob runs at a constant rate of 8 minutes per mile, how many miles farther south can he run and still be able to return to the parking lot in 50 minutes?
Being a value investor means looking at the downside before the upside.
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Happy Investing,
Chris, Vyom, Ankit, Mitchell, Fernanda, & Patrick