Playing the M&A Game

N E W  Y O R K, Nov. 28 -- Though market indices have been hitting record lows for the year, one area is seeing new highs: mergers and acquisitions.

So far in 2000, some $1.65 trillion worth of merger-and-acquisition deals have been announced, according to Thomson Financial Securities Data. That’s a record that beats the previous record year, in 1998, when $1.63 trillion worth of deals were reported.

One question is: How can an individual investor make money from the trend?

There’s always chance — the chance of owning a company that gets acquired at a premium to its share price. That’s what happened to Honeywell International investors earlier this year, when General Electric agreed to pay a 20 percent premium for Honeywell shares.

Long-Shot Way to Make Money

Some professional value investors do look for stocks they think would make good takeover targets. But that’s a long-shot way to make money.

“It takes inside information or a very good hunch to predict when one company will buy another,” says Greg Ringhahl, a certified financial planner in Lantana, Fla. “A deal will still need regulatory approval, and the stock of the company that will be acquired usually has to increase for you to make money.”

Given those odds, perhaps the best way for individual investors to play the M&A game is through mutual funds. M&A funds do not try to catch the rising stock of a potential takeover target. Rather, they invest in companies after a takeover announcement, and make money from stock swaps and other deals. These funds come in after a deal is announced and take advantage of the disparity between the stock price of the acquiring company and its acquisition target, says Michael Gaul, a fund analyst at Morningstar. Investing in these funds can be a good market-neutral strategy, he adds, as the funds depend not on market movements but on merger and acquisition deals that happen in both good and bad markets.

Today’s Deals Are Strategic