A Friend of the Blog (and local Oregon State fan) alerted us on Friday to this seemingly innocuous stock briefing: Hexcel Corp. firmly denied rumors of a potential takeover by Honeywell.
What happened here, our friend explained, was that investors often use software that tracks the tail numbers of private jets. If the private jet of a potential acquirer is seen at an airport near a potential acquisition target, traders focused on mergers and acquisitions start trading on it. It’s the old college-football-message-board thing, just, you know, for business. Anyway, a Honeywell plane was seen near Hexcel, Hexcel’s stock price spiked, Hexcel had to come out and say, “No, Honeywell is not acquiring us.”
The good part of this, our friend explained, is that if acquirers really wanted this kind of news to stay private, given how paradoxically conspicuous private jets are (because, again, of tail numbers), they’d fly coach. Which then, theoretically, could lead to an industry where investors could employ people to camp out at airports watching for the executives of suspected acquirers and seeing which planes they board. Rather than spend the money on the software, you spend the money on training and employing someone with excellent facial memory. This, of course, would in turn lead to disguises. Which is why we’re all about this here at The Barking Crow.
One of the things we love about sports is that they give us, humanity, a good outlet for that little instinct of ours to go to war. It’s a productive form of tribalism, or at least more productive than, well, the current political sphere (or war itself, I guess—literal war, believe it or not, is worse than Twitter, YouTube, and propaganda on cable). We, human beings, also have an instinct towards intrigue. We love us some gossip. We love us some drama. We love us a good spy thriller.
We do have good outlets for this other instinct, and those are 1) fiction, inclusive of everything from books to movies, and 2) talking shit about our friends and family behind their backs. But hey, maybe investing could give us a similar experience? While my friend suggested hiring people to camp out near security lines, I offer that we’d be better served getting a bunch of private investigators up in this. Trench coats. Mustaches. Big, thick glasses. Chicken costumes. (No one expects a chicken of pulling off a hostile takeover, and yet every chicken takeover is hostile—ever think about that?) Think about how valuable the industry could be! Move over, Ivy Leaguers studying finance. Step into the spotlight, Ivy Leaguers studying costuming, espionage, and trailing Ubers in major cities. This is the next wave.
