Sale of a listed company to another

Discussion in 'Options' started by Aquarians, Jan 14, 2017.

  1. During backtests I got some strange results on some underliers like ARIA or RLYP. Looking at ARIA on Yahoo ( https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ARIA?p=ARIA ), all of a sudden the stock movement ceased being random and looks like a constant, very small oscillations around $24.

    Investigating, it looks like Aria it's going to be bought and each shareholder will receive $24 ( https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ariad-shareholder-notice-faruqi-faruqi-221800649.html ).

    This stuff's new to me. I've been trading stock indices mainly and they don't suddenly stop moving.

    So does stuff like this happen with equities? Companies are bought by others and they get de-listed? And stock owners receive some compensation?

    If so, I have a problem with my historical marketdata, as I've no info on corporate actions for it. Actually I have dividends and splits but it looks like it's not enough...
     
  2. Tim Smith

    Tim Smith

    If you don't know what survivorship bias is, then you're not doing your backtesting right.

    Backtesting is a bit of a waste of time at the best of times, but at least if you're going to do it, do it properly.

    P.S. I also suggest you look up the words curve fitting, because that's another common trap newbies fall into.
     
    Last edited: Jan 14, 2017
  3. JackRab

    JackRab

    I would go as far as saying go buy the book "trading for dummies" first.

    I mean... really? You basically don't know what a stock is?
     
  4. vanzandt

    vanzandt

    Read up on Michael's.
    Guitar Center is another good one.
     
  5. Stocks and stock indices are similar, or so I thought. But stocks have splits. Dividends. Mergers and acquisitions. And there's also the quality of marketdata: there's never perfect data (unless you're paying through your teeth for it).

    Try writing a software that correctly handles all US options and see it's not that easy.