This was my first time doing a tender offer anywhere. I tendered $75k face value of AMC bonds way back in mid June. After the original deadline, IBKR sent me some paperwork to fill out, to verify i'm an accredited investor etc. I sent that in. Then AMC decided to revise the offer and I re-tendered my bonds. After the revised deadline, IBKR sent me additional paperwork to fill out, but this time they'd changed the terms so that individual accredited investors are no longer eligible (only institutions). So I was unable to complete that paperwork. I called IBKR a couple months ago and they said the bonds would returned after some unspecified amount of time. I'm still waiting. A few thoughts: 1. It would have been nice to get some advance notice that accredited individual investors were no longer eligible for the revised offer so that I could have just sold my bonds instead of tendering them. Can they make the required paperwork available BEFORE the final deadline? 2. It's relatively -EV for anyone who's not an institutional accredited investor to own any distressed bonds, because they can get screwed out of the option of participating in tender offers like this. The structure of the deal provided a huge advantage to the tenderers at the expense of the non-tenderers. By my reckoning tendering had more than double the expected value of holding the non-tendered bonds to maturity/bankruptcy. The deal created so many new bonds with higher priority that non-tenderers would almost certainly get nothing in bankruptcy, and there's a very high chance of bankruptcy. 3. It's ironic that the SEC's "protection" of individual investors is actually robbing them of a lot of EV here by depriving them of the option to participate in certain tender offers. An option can't have negative value. (Or maybe it's not the SEC's fault and AMC decided of their own accord to rob the individual investors?) 4. This isn't the 90s anymore, so why don't we have web forms instead of PDFs that you print, fill out by hand, scan, and email back? All the required information is already in my IBKR profile so it should be automatically sent to the GBSC as needed. 5. Have any of you had good or bad experiences with tender offers on IBKR?
I got a good email response from IBKR privately. Supposedly I overlooked some language in the revised prospectus about how only institutional investors can participate in the first lien new issue portion of the deal. So I'm only getting $650 of the second lien notes for each $1000 of subordinated notes that I tendered. That's better than not tendering them at all, but not as good as full participation in the new issue.