What happened to buyers of ABT right before the split?
The trades after that date were Ex-DIV, meaning after 5 pm Dec 12, new trades did not include the shares that were to be spun out.  The process is very orderly, no one pays $60 without getting the spinoff, and no one pays $30 but still gets it. The real question is why there's that long delay nearly three weeks to make the spinoff shares available. I don't know.  By the way, the stock options are adjusted as well. Someone owning a $50 put isn't suddenly in the money on 12/13. Edit - (I am not a hoarder. I started a fire last night and realized I had a few Barron's in the paper pile) This is how the ABT quote appeared in the 12/24 issue of Barron's. Both the original quote, and the WI (when issued) for the stock less the spin off company.
The stock split, it is similar to what happened to Apple a little while back. When Google split 2 to 1, it means that each share holder got 2 shares for each 1 share they had and each share was 1/2 the price. This is dumb on many levels.  First are they really trying to blame the Flash Crash for investors leaving the market. It's 2014 and they claim in 17 of 25 months since the 2010 crash investors have withdrawn (not really sure what this means either, since shares don't disappear- does this just mean the market is up? It's unclear). Either way the article quoted is from 2012! And for a research team creating an empirical model, this is a very scary usage of small sample size,  mistaking correlation for causation,  etc.  And the algo,  though they don't give much info,  seems to be the very essence of data mining. Pick a million signals and filter on those that are empirically the best.  If you are an individual investor or a small fund thinking of purchasing something like this,  first consider: if it really worked, why are the founders selling it when they could just use it themselves and profit from it? It's almost guaranteed not to work out of sample Thanks for your thorough reply.   Basically, I found a case study in one of my old finance workbooks from school and am trying to complete it.   So it's not entirely complicated in the sense of a full LBO or merger model.   That being said, the information that they provide is Year 1 EBITDA for TargetCo and BuyerCo and a Pro-Forma EBITDA for the consolidated company @ Year 1 and Year 4 (expected IPO). I was able to get the Pre-Money and Post-Money values and the Liquidation values (year 4 IPO), as well as the number of shares.   I can use EBITDA to get EPS (ebitda/share in this case) for both consolidated and stand-alone @ Year 1, but can only get EPS for consolidated for all other years. Given the information provided. One of the questions I have is do I do anything with my liquidation values for an accretion/dilution analysis or is it all EPS? I don't buy it.  Certainly they could have looked at the underlying mortgages, and if you going to be buying $billions of these things, even a cursory spot check would have revealed big issues.  All these bastards were in it together: banks, ratings agencies, and government entities.  No one wanted the party to stop; indeed each of those three groups had vested interests in keeping the party going. I work in finance and this is something we have never seen before. They lost their insider commitments about a day before the deal was supposed to price but CS pushed it through anyways. Definitely going to be some lawsuits on this one. My understanding was that if a company buys back shares then those shares are 'extinguished' I.e. the rest of the shareholders now own a greater portion of the company. However, if there is only one share left, then the company could not buy it because doing so would extinguish it leaving the company without an owner. That result would run contrary to the requirements for an incorporated company in countries like NZ and Australia. I see your point and I agree with your ideology, but, this is afterall /r/finance, and the record labels are undoubtedly shareholder value -wise much better off just the way they are operating. why allow the market become fragmented by supporting new disruptive players if you can rake it all home in a monopolistic market. BoA was coerced into buying Countrywide by the Fed, to try to keep the housing industry from falling apart.  It didn't work, but it did make for a more managed failure.  After the sale, BoA and the Fed found out just how screwed up Countrywide was, after BoA had assumed financial liability.  Now that BoA has sorted things out a bit and has money, New York is going after a bit of the damages caused by Countrywide in the first place.  EDIT: [This is the guy](http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-197.htm) that caused the mess in the first place.  Probably should have been some jail time along with his record fine though. Yes, because most were holding it from 50-300 dollars cost pre-split, giving them a very healthy dividend yield today.  The question is upside if you buy today, not upside from 5 years ago.  I bought it at 300 too, but today other stocks are making me money... "&gt;""Frequently you’ll see that there’s really no future for the business beyond the selling season,” Albergotti said. “Lenders want to liquidate inventory and get as much cash as they can to sell the company and move on.”  The last paragraph of the article really echoes your sentiment. With the exception of a few brands that could be ""saved"" - whether it is due to their strong customer base or a maneuverable capital structure / balance sheet - there is a lot to be concerned about  when it comes to these traditional retailers." Insiders (those who are aware of non-public material information, not necessarily employees) are the ones who actually cannot sell once they learned about whatever, by law. Martha Stewart went to jail for that. Any such deviation from the norm triggers abnormal response and avalanche of rumors, so by default investors assume something bad and try to minimize the loss. When dealing with a tiny company (market cap of less than 15M) with a tiny market volume (6.2M), the swings can be very significant. For such a small company, it is safe to assume that something happened that lead them to delay the conference call, and since they didn't tell what happen, investors assume the worst. It might end up as the CEO and CFO having bad stomach after celebrating 100% growth in revenue they were going to announce, but you'll have to wait and see.... You got me wondering.  Initially, I read it as a fine, but it seems like that's the case anyway.  [The states are splitting it](http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/08/21/new-york-gets-800m-in-bank-of-america-settlement/).  Sadly enough, they're using some of the money to get the houses.  &gt;The bank has agreed to contribute at least $20 million in cash and property to local governments and nonprofits. Schneiderman’s office said that contribution should allow the state to take over as many as 300 properties that were left vacant by their previous occupants once foreclosure proceedings began. Different stakeholders have different views of 'failure'. Maybe from Air Berlin's point of view it was a failure, but technically speaking it is not really possible to 'fail'. As long as all shares were purchased, which is a virtual guarantee since the investment banks who underwrite the IPO by and large must do to some extent, it will always be 'successful'. A decrease in value of shares immediately after IPO means that the investment bank who did the IPO for Air Berlin didn't match its IPO price with market expectations, causing shorts on the stock, and thus a decline. No failure per se. Okay I don't know where my disconnect was, in my mind I was viewing that as a negative for some reason haha. Thanks! That makes sense.  What is your perspective on the large amount of companies buying back shares right now? "Such data is typically only available from paid sources due to the amount of research involved in determining the identity of delisted securities, surviving entities in merger scenarios, company name changes, symbol changes, listing venue changes, research of all capital events such as splits, and to ensure that the data coverage is complete. Many stocks that are delisted from a major exchange due to financial difficulties are still publicly tradeable companies with their continuing to trade as ""OTC"" shares.  Some large companies even have periods where they traded for a period of their history as OTC.  This happened to NYSE:NAV (Navistar) from Feb 2007 to July 2008, where they were delisted due to accounting statement inaccuracies and auditor difficulties.   In the case of Macromedia, it was listed on NASDAQ 13 Dec 1993 and had its final day of trading on 2 Dec 2005.  It had one stock split (2:1) with ex-date of 16 Oct 1995 and no dividends were ever paid. Other companies are harder to find.  For example, the bankrupt General Motors (was NYSE:GM) became Motoros Liquidation Corp (OTC:MTLQQ) and traded that way for almost 21 months before finally delisting. In mergers, there are in two (or more) entities - one surviving entity and one (or more) delisted entity.  In demergers/spinoffs there are two (or more)  entities - one that continues the capital structure of the original company and the other newly formed spun-off entity.  Just using the names of the companies is no indication of its history. For example, due to monopoly considerations, AT&T were forced to spinoff multiple companies in 1984 and effectively became 75% smaller.  One of the companies they spunoff was Southwestern Bell Corporation, which became SBC Communications in 1995.  In 2005 SBC took over its former parent company and immediately changed its name to AT&T.  So now we have two AT&Ts - one that was delisted in 2005 and another that exists to this day. Disclosure: I am a co-owner of Norgate Data (Premium Data), a data vendor in this area."