Two companies fall in love, or one company makes the other an offer it can't refuse. Either way, two stock prices are about to disagree violently — and now there's a page that watches for it.

Mergers are the one corner of the market where a headline moves two prices in opposite directions on purpose. The target jumps toward whatever premium was offered, because who wouldn't like a 30% pay rise for doing nothing differently on a Tuesday. The acquirer, meanwhile, often drifts down — the market quietly doing the math on "did they overpay" and "how many new shares just got printed to pay for this." It's the closest thing finance has to a wedding where one side visibly regrets the vows by the reception.

Merger Spotter watches for the proposal, the rumour, the denial, the "sources say," and eventually the actual signed piece of paper — and keeps a scorecard.

What it does

• Reads the boring documents first. SEC EDGAR full-text search for 8-Ks, tender offers, 13D activist stakes and merger proxies — the ones companies are legally required to file, which makes them by far the most trustworthy gossip in finance. No LLM required; the form code and the item number are the stage.
• Reads the less boring ones too. Company newswires, Finnhub's merger feed and Google News exclusives, in English, German, French and Italian — because "Übernahmegespräche" is just "talks_reported" wearing a trench coat.
• Figures out who's buying whom. A small, cheap AI reading pass turns "BASF gains after report of Evonik takeover approach" into an actual buyer, an actual target, and a stage — never inventing a price or a ticker it wasn't told.
• Refuses to gossip carelessly. A deal's stage only ever moves forward — rumour → talks → approach → agreed → regulatory → done (or dead). One breathless headline cannot un-announce a deal that was already signed, and a tier-3 "sources say it's agreed" only counts as a rumour of an agreement until someone more official says so.
• Tracks the aftermath. Target and acquirer price reaction at +1/+5/+21 sessions, plus the merger-arb spread on agreed cash deals — the gap between what's offered and what the market still thinks it's worth, which is basically the market's polite way of saying "we'll believe it when we see it."
• Is not American-only. German, Japanese, Chinese and Korean names resolve to their home listings, not a US ADR that happens to share a name — the alternative is embarrassing.

Why we bothered

Because "who's buying whom" is one of the few genuinely leading market signals a normal person can act on before the professionals finish reading the press release, and because a rumour that becomes a deal is a much better story than a rumour that becomes nothing — and both are worth knowing which one you're looking at.

The personal alert bell is switched off for now — the feed gets to prove it can tell a real takeover from a debt-tender-offer-that-technically-contains-the-word-"tender" before it's allowed to ping your phone. The page itself, and the terminal, don't have that problem.

Find it under Markets → Merger Spotter, or press Ctrl+K and type "mergers". In the terminal, mergers (or ma, if you're the efficient type) opens it inline. No new API keys were harmed in the making of this feature.