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Shares in BP gained on Friday, with traders citing talk that Exxon Mobil was considering a bid for the oil company.
By 10:29 a.m. EDT, BP shares were up 1.1 percent at 450 pence, having hit an intraday high of 451.35 pence on the rumor. Get the full story »
Shares of Northern Trust Corp. jumped 4.4 percent on Tuesday as talk swirled that HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, may be planning to make a bid for the U.S. trust bank and investment manager. Get the full story »
OfficeMax Inc. shares rose 9.3 percent to $15.69 in heavy trading Tuesday after a J.P. Morgan analyst said that the office supply company was ripe for a leveraged buyout.
The Naperville-based retailer is undervalued compared to its larger rivals Staples Inc. and Office Depot Inc., analyst Christopher Horvers said in the report. Even though OfficeMax is five years into a turnaround effort, there is still plenty of room left to restructure the business, he said. The report valued OfficeMax at $28 a share, citing the company’s cash pile along with a slew of expiring leases that would allow OfficeMax to move to higher traffic locations and open smaller, more productive stores. Get the full story »
Some say the wave of bank consolidation seen in the last two decades is over, but an outspoken analyst who developed a formula for identifying banks that could be takeover targets on Thursday listed 17 he says are ripe, including Chicago-based MB Financial. Get the full story »
Johnson & Johnson said Monday it plans to bolster its lineup of stroke-prevention products by buying Micrus Endovascular Corp. for about $480 million, marking the latest deal in a neurovascular-device market that appears to be heating up.
J&J’s planned purchase of San Jose, Calif.-based Micrus comes weeks after rival Covidien PLC announced plans to buy ev3 Corp. , a Micrus rival, for $2.6 billion. Leerink Swann analyst Rick Wise said the Covidien-ev3 combination may have spurred on J&J amid a trend of focusing more on bundled portfolios of products. Get the full story »
