If you remember, I mentioned Burger King (
BKC
) was the subject of takeover rumors yesterday, but that I would
consider the shares if they pulled back from the big one-day
spike.
Well, this time it didn't pay to wait. It was announced in the
pre-market that Burger King will be taken private for $24 a share
in cash. I felt the deal talk was legitimate, but chasing a stock
after a 1-day spike never usually makes sense. I can tell you of
numerous rumors I have heard over the years that almost never
panned out. One of the more recent ones I remember was when
Countrywide Financial was trading and there was a rumor out that
Merrill Lynch was going to make a run at the company. The stock
shot up 6 points intraday and CNBC was all over the rumors. The
deal made sense at the time, but never came to pass. In this
business, you will sometimes miss on an opportunity, but at the end
of the day, an investor will never go wrong having a discipline to
their investing approach.
Looking at the rest of the market, monthly retail sales were out
this morning, and Wall Street liked what it heard from Limited
Brands (
LTD
) and Nordstrom Inc. (
JWN
) especially. Other stocks doing nicely in today's trading included
CME Group (
CME
) , Blackrock (
BLK
) , and Broadcom (
BRCM
) .
I expect volume to begin to recede into holiday mode over the
next couple of days. We finished at 3.7 Billion shares on the NYSE,
which was not as bad as it could have been. Tomorrow will be an
interesting day with the monthly jobs data being released. With the
remnants of Hurricane Earl moving up the East Coast, some holiday
week trips may not start as early as usual for some of the Wall
Street faithful. Use this time to go through your portfolio and
check to see if there are any errors in any of the transactions you
may have made over the last quarter. You would be surprised to find
that even the most organized investors will sometimes make the
simplest of mistakes, like hitting the buy button instead of the
sell button. Instead of thinking you are out of a position, you may
have indeed actually bought more. It pays to look it over. See you
tomorrow!
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