Fission Uranium Corp T.FCU

📝Rumours continue to circulate🦻🦜 that a superior bid for

[mangoe]

John Quakes

@quakes99 -

Rumours continue to circulate that a superior bid for Fission #Uranium $FCU may be surfacing soon ahead of the 26 August shareholder vote on whether to accept Paladin Energy's C$1.14B takeout offer. Are there telltale signs to support the rumours? Let's see...

On June 24th Fission's shares jumped +15.5% from $1.03 to $1.19 on very high volume as news of Paladin's offer hit the market. In subsequent trading days we've seen the shares rise a further 8c +6.7% on continued higher than normal trading volume, now at $1.27 for a rise of 24c +23.3% since the offer... while Paladin's shares have traded down and back up to be essentially unchanged since it made its offer.

The market appears to be taking the view that Fission shareholders will accept the offer... or are becoming increasingly confident that a superior offer is coming from another bidder that will start a bidding war.

Normally, it can take several weeks or months for a major mining company to undertake due diligence on a potential takeout target, crunching the numbers to decide on a bid price and how to structure it in terms of cash and/or shares to offer.

If they are serious about making an offer then they will usually undertake to quietly acquire as many shares of the takeover target as possible in order to control as many voting shares as they can get their hands on without alerting the market to their takeover plan. If they can secure up to 10% of the target's voting shares prior to making their offer (the threshold for triggering an early warning notice) then they have a much better chance of achieving the 67% acceptance vote needed.

Is there any evidence of such accumulation by a competitive bidder?

A bidder trying to quietly acquire Fission shares will usually ask their broker to tag their buys as 'Anonymous' or use multiple brokers to distribute the buying so as not to raise any alarms.

In terms of buying volume, there are definitely some very high volume trading days since the offer was made, suggesting that there is a transfer of shares from traders taking profits to investors accumulating voting shares ahead of the July 19th deadline when Fission fixes the shareholders eligible to vote, such as the over 21 Million shares that traded hands on July 3rd. If we see volumes continue to rise heading to July 19th, that signals to me that interested parties are trying to lock up as many voting shares as possible.

If we look at Fission's trading data on its primary listing in Canada from 25 June to 5 July, over 88 Million shares have been traded with over a third of those assigned the broker tag Anonymous. Major US investment firms Morgan Stanley, Raymond James and JP Morgan are also among the top net buyers of Fission shares since the offer date.

It's impossible to draw any conclusions with respect to whether or not a competitive superior bid is in the offing but Fission's trading data does show that there are a high volume of Anonymous share transactions being made and some heavy buying via major investment brokers. Something to keep an eye on over the next 2 weeks heading to the July 19th pegging of Fission's shareholder voting list. Cheers!

 

 

12:34 PM · Jul 7, 2024

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