I agree 100%. These hedge funds will never protect any company's interest by keeping deals confidential and in any case I don't see how they get a deal like this done without shopping it around. Even if the stock purchasing fund were to conform to the letter of the law (assuming that there even is a law preventing them from manipulating the purchase price) and aren't the ones shorting the stock into the price settlement of the deal you can be sure they are colluding with other funds to cut the price to the bone to get the lowest possible settlement price. I think that it just stands to reason that one way or another the purchaser of the shares has participated in the pre-settlement sell off either directly or by a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" dealing with other hedge fund(s) so that as much as possible they will have already sold the shares or pre-arranged for a sale to whoever was the excess selling interest for the 10 or so consecutive down days with higher than normal volume by almost 1M shares per day right up to 5/29 then lo and behold the volume drops to only 600k damn shares the day after the price was set.
Longs have seen this pattern play out many times and it's especially bad if investors don't realize exactly what has happened. There is a reason and every time we see the price fall into the deal and then make a hard bounce back only to learn that the deal was priced at the bottom and after it was priced the pps had naturally started recovering sharply off the artificially created bottom and has already rebounded really well from the worst of the selloff by the time the deal actually closes at the price determined by the manipulated low. This creates disappointment in some and bashers will be sure to reinforce the illusion that the actual discount on the deal was not off the low of cycle but rather off the partially recovered price prevailing when the deal finally closes and gets announced. "see, they had to discount by 20% to get a deal" is BS, the actual discount was about 10%.
As you say it's hardly the case that Les and Linda are stupid. There is just no way to avoid the hedge funds screwing us on these kinds of deals. The $ amount is very small relative to what the funds do that it's so easy for them to force the price down into the deal.
To those who think it's a good sign that the particular fund bought in, I wish that were true but I think it's much more likely to have been a shooting-fish-in-the-barrel opportunity for them to make a very quick buck at very low risk. Again this is built into this capital market. And it has never been so stone cold clear in that we went steadily down with high volume of sellers into the settlement and then the volume fell by 2/3 or more the instant that the pricing was done.
Actually I give Les at least a little credit for stating so specifically this time the date that the price settled. I don't remember for certain but I don't recall them stating that information so clearly on previous deals that always involved the same kind of price manipulation in the past. Knowing the day that the price settled the manipulation that went into the pricing couldn't be any clearer especially this time around.
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