Last night, E-Trade announced a takeover bid for its largest competitor, Ameritrade, offering $1.5 billion in cash and a 47.5 percent share of the merged company to Ameritrade stockholders.
Ameritrade officials quickly answered the bid by asserting that the company was not for sale.
Last Thursday, Ameritrade CFO Randy MacDonald visited our New York offices, basically to chat about the company’s prospects. While here, I congratulated him on the talk he gave at CFO Rising in April on mergers and acquisitions. According to our internal research, his speech was a big hit.
In the talk, MacDonald focused on a string of successful acquisitions that were deftly integrated into the existing company. Indeed, CFOs in the audience were anxious to hear MacDonald's war stories, and he complied by candidly sharing nitty gritty details about integration headaches and victories.
When the E-Trade news broke, I wanted to ask MacDonald how he felt, now that Ameritrade was the target of a takeover. But Ameritrade declined to comment on the E-Trade bid as a matter of policy. So unfortunately, I’m left wondering what MacDonald might have said.
Wish I had known last week what I know now. Isn’t that always the way.
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