Merger Mania: Arbitrage : Wall Street's Best Kept Money-Making Secret

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy it.
Review: A way to basic explanation of arbitrage that spends more time on Ivan's "successes"

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Inside View
Review: This book will teach you some things you never learned in law school about corporations. It's like a cookbook for someone who knows about cooking and it's very concise. Explaining how to take an investment position on a merger, it literally provides an inside look at how an arbitrage deal is put together. An "Anatomy of a Deal" chart provides a typical time line chart from the first approach in secret to the legal closing. Covers how tender offers work, merger defenses, calculating work-out values, potential profit and risk for cash only tenders, cash plus stock tenders, calculating target rate of return, and details of risks involved; how to determine if the merger will be completed, and more. Unlike other books which are overfilled with generalizations and boring histories of past deals, this book is really to the point on each topic with a minimum of "war stories" included to help to explain how things work. Moderately technical and not for casual entertainment but for serious investors who want to learn how to arbitrage mergers.

Several things are touched on only lightly, such as how to detect potential merger preparation and activities before official filings are done. While one wouldn't expect all of the incriminating details, a few hints would be nice to know about how to spot pre-notice merger preparations. Not a tell-all about the man himself but only about his methods he used to become wealthy. It is apparent that brilliant anaysis was the key to his success.

Rating:
Summary: Greed is Good - at Berkeley!
Review: Who'd have thought that the incubator of liberal socialism would father the definitive term of the '80's?
This is not a good read - legend says it's ghost written by a graduate student - but who cares? I have a first edition, and it's offically penned by a man as notorious as Jay Gould and Jesse Livermore.
Shelf it somewhere in your library next to Hogan's Power Golf, Brealey & Myers, and Vintage Cocktails.
Bon Pillage!