Not aMUSEd: The UK “Portal Pain Basket” (Mony Group, Autotrader & Rightmove)

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH

I actually started to write this post before the newest hype about “Muse”, the new AI Agent from META, really went mainstream. I decided to leave the old part and then update it instead of completely changing it.

As my DCC investment ends its “natural life” and I have begun to unwind it, I decided to have a look at a group of beaten up UK stocks that one could summarize as “Comparison portals” or “Two sided online market places”: : Mony Group (Insurance), Autotrader (cars) and Rightmove (real estate).

As the post became quite long, I also picked a track to keep you entertained while your LLM assistant is summarizing the post for you:

Green Day – Basket Case

Green Day – Basket Case [Official Music Video] (4K Upgrade)

Here a quick summary for each company: 

Mony Group SE

Mony Group, the former Moneysupermarket Group is a UK focused comparison portal where people go to compare quotes for Insurance policies, loans, broadband tariffs, electricity contracts. in addition they offer a referral shopping app/system that offers Cashbacks (discounts).

This is from the 6M Investor presentation with the distribution of sales::

We can see that insurance is over half and that they have disinvested travel related offerings in 2025.

This TIKR Screenshot shows us that Mony’s stock was not a very good investment over the past 10 years:

However the share price seems to have stabilized to a certain extent and the stock is cheap. The business as such is very profitable and has been growing low single digits for the past 3 years or so.

Other than the next two companies, Mony is only the number two comparison portal in the UK, pretty far behind a site called “Compare the Market” but bigger than “go.Compare” and “Confused” which used to belong to Admiral.

One important detail is that Italian Marketplace company Moltiply (former Mutui Online) is the largest shareholder with ~12% and they have been adding as recently as in June 2026.

Multiply has been collecting comparison marketplaces steadily, like Verivox in Germany or the non-UK sites from Admiral.

Autotrader

Autotrader is THE leading UK online car portal where both auto dealers and private customers are buying and selling mostly used cars. It used to be a print magazine but successfully transformed into THE dominant online market place in the UK.

It is supposed to have a market share of 75-80% in the UK. Over the last 10 years, it has not done much especially after it got hit by “SAASocalypse” fears:

The stock is a little bit more expensive than Money Group, but almost absurdly profitable.

What is worth mentioning is that Autotrader has already started and committed to a massive share repurchase program:

One additional threat for Autotrade is that Amazon seems to be going for a piece of Autotraders cake and wants to enter the market still in 2026.

In the US, where Amazon is already in the market, success so far seems to be mixed at best. It reminds me a little bit about the auto tire business where Amazon started some years ago but didn’t succeed either.

Rightmove

What Autotrader is to cars, Rightmove is to real estate with the only exception that Brits are really obsessed about real estate. Almost any (friendly) Brit I know is using far too much time scrolling through right move listings.

Rightmove is the most profitable of the three and also the most expensive at 15x next year P/E.

In 2024, REA, the “rightmove of Australia” tried to take over Rightmove at a final offer of 7,80 GBP/share but wasn’t successful.

Interestingly, earnings are up between 20-30% depending on which line you look at since then, but the stock is trading at a deep discount to that take-over bid.

The AI Threat:

Looking at 1 year charts we can see that especially Autotrader and Rightmove were hit by AI fears, Moneysupermarket a little bit less so:

The 5 year chart shows that Moneysupermarket started to struggle earlier, in 2024:

While we are having fun with charts, we can compare Autotrader and Rightmove with Sage, the listed UK Accounting Software company:

Interestingly, Sage has recovered most of its losses in the last 12 months, wile Autotrader and Rightmove so far have not.

Now to our last Chart comparison. This time Rightmove with Scout24 from Germany and REA from Australia which shows that across geographies, the stock market is really sceptical vs. portals and that this is not only a UK thing:

So the Billion Dollar question here is clearly: Will AI (and especially agents) disrupt the “Two sided marketplace” model and if yes, how fast will this happen ?

Clearly, Vibe coding a new AutoTrader or Rightmove or Moneysupermarket is not so hard. However that leaves you with the main task:

  • how to you motivate, both, corporate and retail clients to move over to the new “platform” quickly ?

Or, will people just go to their favorite chatbot and type in: Please look for a new house and buy it for me ?

In my opinion, the audience of the current platforms could be quite sticky, especially in the case of Rightmove, which to my understanding is only partially about buying a new house and partially just entertainment.

And yes, there will be people going directly through agents but an agent in order to deliver the same result as a good comparison site/market place would need to have the same infrastructure, i.e. connections to companies in order to get the required updated information and access to actually do the transactions.

Not aMUSEd – the Update

Now while I was writing the above and also starting to build my positions slowly, the share prices of all three stocks (and its peers) started to go down pretty dramatically, as this chart shows:

There was no individual news for those companies but rather the sudden “insight” that Meta’s launch and early success of its Agentic App “Muse” will be a problem for everyone who currently lives from comparing things online. 

Muse is currently only available in the US and has shot up to the number 1 downloaded App over there. 

In the past few days, among other stocks, also travel related “aggregator” stocks went down significantly because of this:

The question is clearly: How real is that fear of (short term) disruption ?

I think it makes sense to look at a few “hurdles” for the agentic take-over:

  1. Consumer behaviour US vs. RoW

If we look at Mony Group for instance whose main product is insurance comparison: In the UK, more than 80% of insurance policies are closed/renewed through comparison portals. In the US, this business model is quasi non-existent.

To my understanding, Americans might maybe call one other carrier if they feel that their insurance contract is too expensive, but they would never make the effort to compare their insurance portfolio on a regular basis.

In the UK, this is normal, the same here in Germany. Normally, your favourite portal will know all your relevant details and will actively send you better offers before the old contracts expire. One click and you have cheaper insurance.

So for any active comparison portal user, there is very little to gain by using an AI agent, rather the opposite. And this is before the fact that insurance comparison is a regulated business (as insurance is).

  1. Real time capabilities of LLMs

One thing where at least I struggle a lot with LLMs is to make sure that they really use real time information and not some stale training data. Not sure how they solve it with agents, but I guess that that might still be an issue. Especially if you are looking for a used car or a flat to rent, you need to be really quick for the good deals.

Most portals already offer some kind of “alarm” function for interesting objects. I am not sure if and how AI agents can make sure to have access to the newest offers.

  1. Anti-agent measures 

The most interesting aspect in my opinion will be to see if and to what extent the existing owners of “comparison inventory” will allow AI agents onto their platform. Amazon for instance, has already blocked Muse, which is no surprise as Amaon’s Ad model would be jeopardized. 

Amazon is also smart enough, not to let Meta access its inventory and also its ship infrastructure. 

That’s maybe another point here: At least in the business world, Meta is not your partner of choice. Noone likes them, no one trusts them.

So we could go on and on, but I do not think and especially in “comparison crazy” UK, that AI Agents will be a super fast disruptive force that will make the incubents worthless over night.

But, and this is a big BUT: The stock market could act as this is the case for quite some time.

Whenever the overall AI narrative looks good and AI stocks go up, these stocks, that are perceived as AI losers will go down. No matter if the fundamentals shows something or not.

KPI overview:

Here is a quick overview of some KPIs that I looked at, including German real estate portal Scout24 which is similar to Rightmove.

We can see that Mony is really cheap, whereas Rightmove is clearly the most profitable. Autotrader is in between with the biggest “buyback yield”.

Scout 24 is clearly more expensive, most likely because growth has been higher than for the UK players, but that is also a risk if AI Agent adoption happens faster than I assume. For this reason and because I wanted UK exposure, I didn’t include them in the basket (yet).

Multiple compression

For all 3 stocks, valuation multiples have been compressed significantly. Let’s look at Autotrader first, which was only listed in 2015:

The P/E and EV/EBIT multiples are at absolute lows and at around1/2 of the historical mean.

For Rightmove, this looks very similar:

Money was never that expensive but is also now historically cheap:

While “mean reversion” is not a good investment case as such in a disruptive environment, it clearly shows that the stocks are at least cheap compared to historical valuations. Not that long ago, investors thought that a P/E of 30x is fair for Rightmove.

The Basket:

As a start, I allocated to each UK stock (Mony, Autotrader, Rightmove) 1% of the portfolio, making it a 3% position overall. As purchase price I assume an average price at ~5% above today’s closing price each.

I will need to decide going forward if I either increase the size per stock a little or add maybe a few other UK stocks to the basket. We’ll see. At the moment I might go to 1,5% per stock and have overall maybe 5 UK stocks in that basket.

My time horizon for this trade is  15-18 months and I am looking for an upside of 30-50% in total (including dividends) if some normalization kicks in.

As the performance of my “basket trades” so far was rather mixed (Freedom Energy basket was OK, freedom insulation less so), please wish me luck on this one.

Summary:

Investing into comparison portals aka 2 sided market places at the moment is clearly a “pain trade”. The risk of getting punched in the face short term is quite high.

On the other hand, many of these businesses are extremely high quality and as cheap as they have been for the last 10 or 15 years

For the UK players, based on what we have seen in other areas, the probability of M&A action is not zero and I am also convinced that especially for the UK, the fear of a quick take over through AI agents (Muse) is overblown.

Some links 23/2026

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The Slow Compounding substack is “teeing up” a series on 12 less obvious, overlooked serial acquirers

The Quality Stocks Substack with a “Software is not dead” pitch

Warren Buffett now also stepped down as Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway after six decades

For the fans of “special effects accounting”: Prof Meintner on some creative IFRS accounting at Orange 

The AI hype of the Weekend is a new type of model called “Jev”. It’s not as smart as an LLM, but much cheaper, faster and doesn’t hallucinate (Youtube)

Canada has hosted an interesting “invest in Canada” summit last week. Maybe time to look deeper into the Canadian stock market in more depth.

The Bear Cave Substack points out potential problems at Jackson Financial, this time in the form of some Reinsurance Alchemy 

Update Special Situations: Norma, Paypal & NEW: Delivery Hero (No action)

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Norma Buyback Tender:

The original write-up is from mid-June and can be found here. Plus a same day update here.

Looking at the share price development, I clearly got out too early from this one at around 18,85 EUR per share plus dividend:

Overall, I was clearly lucky with the timing of the entry. I closed the trade early because first, I could lock in my expected return and secondly, I was a little bit “off grid” and had limited ability to react during the trading period of the tender rights.

The main difference to my initial case was that the tender price had been further increased from 20,87 EUR to 22,35. Interestingly, for the remaining shareholders, this is not really positive as more cash went to selling shareholders.

I had checked a few times during the trading of the tender rights and they were trading relatively close to their intrinsic value.

What I find quite surprising is that at the time of writing, the stock is still trading pretty high above my  “undisturbed” value before the announcement. And how long it took to come down from the “inflated” tender price. I have to confess that I don’t fully understand this.

Paypal Stripe/Advent offer Special Sit:

Here clearly my expectation of a higher bid from Stripe/Advent did not materialize but they rather dropped their effort.

As mentioned in the comments of the original post, I directly sold after this became public as I have no opinion on the longer term development of Paypal. This is what I wrote back then:

However one more thing is important to mention: This is a special situation investment for me. So if for some reason, Stripe & Advent withdraw their bid, I will sell, no matter what. For a “Value investment” I still find Paypal too hard at this stage. 

Luckily for me, the stock did not drop down to the “undisturbed” price of ~45 USD. So I could get out with a relatively modest single digit loss in this case.

I have to admit that I was already feeling a little bit insecure after Stripe closed the OpenRouter acquisition for ~7,5 bn USD a few days earlier. Stripe is a great company but they don’t seem have an unlimited budget for M&A as a financial intermediary.

As in all of these cases, there is always the risk that a case doesn’t work out. In my opinion, the most important part here is to stick to the original plan (i.e. sell) and try to find out if I have made any “a priori mistakes”.

In this case, the only mistake was maybe not to reduce the position after the open router acquisition from Stripe.

For the future, any public take-over situations with Stripe need to trade at a wider discount to account for this episode.

Delivery Hero/Uber take over Special Sit

As mentioned in my weekly links post, the UBER/ Delivery Hero take over could be an interesting Merger “Arbitrage” Special Situation.

In a nutshell, Uber owns currently around 25% of DHR outright and has launched a take-over offer in late August at an offer price of 41,5 EUR.

Expected closing of the deal is in the second half of 2027 and the acceptance hurdle for this offer is only 51% which Uber seems to have in the bag already.

The main risk of the transaction is clearly a relatively complicated merger control and approval process in many countries and especially an intermediate step where part of DHER’s business needs to get carved out and sold to a Private Equity shop called SSW Partners.

At the current share price of 36,85 EUR/share, the “spread” to the 41,50 EUR offer is 12,6%.

This needs to compensate for:

  • a relative long time horizon (long stop November 2027)
  • a relative high premium to the undisturbed price (+100%)
  • and the aforementioned deal complexity

This is the stock chart from Delivery Hero which shows the significant bid premium:

All my 3 AI Tools (Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini) were recommending not to establish a position due the complexity of the deal (carve-out requirement) and the significant downside in a “no deal” scenario if the “cost of capital” is 10 to 15% p.a.

Personally, I think especially countries like UAE or Saudi Arabia could become more risky with regard to merger clearance when the war in Middle East continues to spread.

So in this case I actually follow the advice and sit on my hands. I will revisit this by end of October to see if it has become more attractive, either by a lower price or some fundamental improvements.

Interestingly, both ChatGPT and Claude offered to build an Excel spreadsheet. Here are some screenshots from ChatGPT which look very professional:

I didn’t check all the formulas, but it seems to be quite good.

In addition, ChatGPT also is checking now 2 times a day for updates.I guess Claude can do the same easily.

Although AI tools don’t change the Special Sit game completely, it clearly makes a more “equal playing field” as it reduces the effort to get into this.

The main risk that I see is that the motivation to actually read relevant documents goes down even more and that it is hard to see if the AI Agent makes mistakes or catches everything.

Some links 22/2026

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Dario Amodei’s Essay on “pacing AI development” is worth reading

Also the independent review of the Hugging Face “Swarm attack” is a good but scary read. 

Emerging Value with an overview of interesting Argentinian stocks

Some very interesting insights from Prof Damodaran on Interest rates and stock prices

Andrew Brown (Dynasty) with an update on Belgium Holdco D’ieteren and Belron

Quality Stocks on Uber’s Delivery Hero acquisition (which could in itself be an interesting special sit)

Charlie Huggins with a decent “bucket list” of topics when assessing company culture

Fielmann Group – Will “Junior” be able to execute the 5 year plan once again ?

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DISCLAIMER: This is not Investment Advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!

Soundtrack:

There were quite a few songs that fit the topic, but in the end I really like Disco so ”Sexy Eyes” from Dr. Hook is my favorite;

Dr. Hook – Sexy Eyes • TopPop

Editorial Notes on AI use:

I do use AI tools (Gemini, Claude, NotebookLM) extensively during the research but I write everything “by hand”. In some cases, I will however copy & paste a summary or result table from a query after checking that the content is plausible. But I will always explicitly mention if I do this explicitly.

Management Summary:

Fielmann Group, the majority family owned German optical retailer has seen a significant multiple compression over the past 10 years despite a very decent operational performance since the Covid lows.

Based on a credible 5 year plan laid out in 2025, Fielmann is attractively priced and if they continue to execute under the leadership of the second generation family CEO, the stock offers significant potential over the next 4-5 years.

For this high margin, high return on capital business with a rock solid balance sheet and strong cashflow generation,  the current valuation of ~15 NTM P/E and ~3,3% dividend yield looks attractive. 

And here is the full write-up:

Fielmann final 08 2026Download

Some links 20/2026

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Some deep thoughts on writing with AI from VC legend Brad Feld

Some thoughts on how mRNA technology could move beyond vaccines

Nice 6M letter from Intrinsic Funds with deep dives into Mercado Libre & Nubank

A new Mauboussin paper on the wisdom and non-wisdom of crowds

A great presentation on UK Trusts at a discount via Swen Lorenz 

An epic and well written introduction and deep dive into the (US) Power Market

Even in “everything goes” Texas, AI data centers face more scrutiny on power and resources consumption  

Quick Updates: Fuchs SE (Buy), Paypal Special Situation (Buy) & EVS SA Post mortem

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESERACH.

Fuchs SE (Buy)

As mentioned in the comments of the initial write-up, I have re-entered Fuchs Common shares with a 2% position. I did sell Fuchs after a disappointment almost 1 year ago. So I was quite surprised that they actually announced “blow out” numbers for Q2 a few days ago:

I talked to some other investors about this and they mostly mentioned that this looks (once again) as a one-time effect with maybe compensating negative results some quarters down the road, very similar to what happened after the attack on Ukraine.

That most likely explains the very muted reaction to a 35% increase in EBIT in Q2 and a significant increase in the full year guidance that according to the release already is conservative.

I actually bought back the shares slightly higher to the level I solid them last year (33,50 EUR vs 31,50 selling price).

What I found especially interesting in the statement from Fuchs was the following passage:

“The strong revenue and earnings growth in the second quarter of 2026 resulted from robust sales performance, driven by pre-buying effects stemming from the conflict in the Middle East, limited delivery ability among certain competitors, and organic growth. “

Digging a little bit deeper one can relatively easily find articles that the Gulf region was and is a major exporter of lubricants and especially the underlying base oils that are needed for high performance lubricants.

In addition, on major base oil refinery in Qatar was directly hit by Iran according to this article:

“Approximately 44% of U.S. Group III demand is typically supplied from the Persian Gulf, but that supply is now largely offline. Damage to Shell’s Pearl GTL facility in Qatar—caused by Iranian rocket strikes—has halted production from a key source of roughly 30,000 barrels per day, with repairs expected to take at least a year. Additional disruptions stem from force majeure declarations by producers in Bahrain and the UAE, as well as the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has stranded product in the region. “

Although I don’t know exactly how Fuchs sources its base oils, it seems that for the time being that they are able to deliver while others have problems.

Of course the situation with Iran can change any day with a single Tweet, but I guess that some supply chain managers are maybe rethinking their dependence on Guld based lubricants which could be a structural opportunity for an independent player like Fuchs.

We will need to see how this develops, but I think Fuchs looks a lot more interesting now at least from my perspective.

Paypal Special situation (Buy) 

In March I wrote about Paypal for the first time and back then, despite being cheap, Paypal was one for the “too hard” pile for me.

Then, after the approach from Stripe and Advent I mentioned the following:

Last Friday, the stock traded at 55,5 USD, offering a 9% “discount” to the potential acquisition price which motivated me to buy a 1,5% position at that level.

The risk return ratio is not too bad at that level. The “undisturbed” price is ~47 USD and there is a pretty good chance of a higher bid either from Advent/Stripe or maybe another competitor might enter the race.

As always, one needs to prepare for volatility around any news in either direction but I think it offers a nice, uncorrelated “bet” on a potentially higher clearing price.

One key player here is clearly the new CEO whose massive bonus is tied to a stock price increase that to my knowledge is much higher than the 60,50 USD offered. So he clearly has an incentive to hold out for a high price OR a nice “golden parachute” from the buyers.

However one more thing is important to mention: This is a special situation investment for me. So if for some reason, Stripe & Advent withdraw their bid, I will sell, no matter what. For a “Value investment” I still find Paypal too hard at this stage.

At the time of writing, the Paypal share price has climbed back to 58,40 USD per share, a level where I would not buy (more). 

(for some strange reason, Google Finance says Paypal is now called Adobe 😉

The main reason for the recent jump seems that Q2 numbers seem to have beaten expectations.

EVS (Broadcast) SA – Post mortem

I had written up EVS SA (formerly known as EVS Broadcast SA) some two years ago. The thesis was the following:

So the company had ambitious growth targets, was relatively cheap and financially super solid.

Initially, the case went well, with 2024 turning out to be a really good year. 

However, 2025 started with a slight disappointment in Q1. Then the stock jumped as they had won a (biggish) contract for the Football Worldcup in Q2.

However, that was soon followed by disappointing 6M numbers. The preliminary 2025 numbers were not great, but back then the outlook for 2026 was still quite positive in March.

But then in May, together with the Q1 trading update, they already guided to the lower end of the range and the CFO lady suddenly left without direct replacement.

This was of course very disappointing and I started to sell part of my stake after that. We can also see that the share price is now lower than when I wrote up the stock in June 2024:

An EBIT /operating profit at the lower end of the 40-50 mn range would mean an EBIT similar to 2023 and that in a year with two very big events, the Winter Olympics and the Football Worldcup.

While that is not a catastrophe, they are now clearly far away from the 10% p.a. growth path that I had underwritten originally. To be honest, I don’t fully understand why the business is so weak. 

What I also found interesting, that Canadian listed competitor Evertz has been doing very well over the past 12 months at least looking at the share price:

While Evertz struggled a little bit in the US market, that specific passage was very interesting in their latest report (that includes Q1):

So while EVS claims that the war in the Gulf is the culprit for the unsatisfactory business, Evertz speaks of “revived growth” in the Middle East. That is quite surprising in my opinion and casts some doubts on the EVS Broadcast story.

So overall, I am not that confident in EVS for the time being and decided to sell my position entirely as I see better opportunities elsewhere.

Some links 19/2026

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Interesting profile on Bill Ackman from Fortune Magazine

Recommended: Sector Stories Substack with yet another well research post, this time on the luxury industry

Interesting deep dive into OpenAIs Business model from a Private Equity perspective

At least in the US, there is a growing bull market for “non-digital” media

Some good news for the environment: Removing “forever chemicals” from soil can be done relatively easily and cheap

A good reminder how far Elon’s companies are still away from any reasonable valuation levels even after the recent drop in share price

Google has released an very interesting study how AI is actually used. In a nutshell, it’s still early days. 

Some links 18/2026

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Upslope Capital’s 6M letter including their Magnum Ice Cream pitch

Dynasty Trust’s quarterly letter with a positive view on Travel stocks and a deep dive into EVT Ltd from Australia

A very good Substack article on the different ways Private Equity Managers fund their own commitments

Great article from Larry Swedroe on the 7 sins of Active Stock investing

Finally, the first Nuclear Fusion company is going public (backed among others by Jeff Bezos). Of course via SPAC.

US households are at an historic record exposure to the stock market

A new study says that the momentum factor is strongest at the last 6 trading days of a month

Quick Updates: Frosta 6M 2026, Paypal vs. Stripe&Advent, Easyjet spectacle & DCC “Sweetener”

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Frosta

Frosta, the German “Hidden frozen Food champion” that I wrote up in February already released 6M results this week.

Highlights: 

Overall sales volume increase by +11,7%. easily beating the market which was around +3%. The real kicker is that the Frosta Brand itself grew by +25% and seems to be further accelerating.

Among other things, Frosta has released two new lines of frozen meals: “High Protein” meals with more meat and “a la carte” restaurant quality meals. Both new lines are at a slightly higher priced point than the original.

I find this a clever strategy, not to increase the prices of their classic range but rather offer even better meals at a higher price point.

After tax income only increased by 2,4%. Gross margins increased a little from 48,3% 6M 2025 to 48,8% in 6M 2026, net income margin declined slightly from 5,5% to 4,9%.

However, the outlook for the full year is VERY positive.

If we take the two midpoints, 13% sales increase and 6,5% net margin, we would end up at 50 mn EUR net profit or an EPS of 7,35 EUR.

Considering that Frosta has ~10 EUR Net cash Cash per share, this translates into 13x P/E for a strongly growing company that is executing extremely well.

If we just compare this with the self proclaimed “Leading European Frozen Food” company Nomad foods, we can clearly see from whom Frosta is taking market share:

As always, Investors were not impressed very much:

I used however the opportunity to increase my Frosta position from 3,2% to 4,5%. And I will keep buying if the share price remains below 100 EUR.

Forsta is in my opinion one of these typical “Peter Lynch” investments: As a german, you can easily go into a supermarket, look how empty the Frosta Shelfs are and buy yourself a few packs to test the quality you get for the rather moderate price.

Paypal

In March I wrote about Paypal and just found it “too hard” for me, given my limited knowledge in the Payment sector.

Even back then, the rumor was that Stripe might be interested in Paypal but I found it not really realistic as there was a limited fit:

Now the Stripe rumour has resurfaced but with an interesting “twist”: Stripe and PE giant Advent (100bn AuM) seem to have teamed up offered 60,50 USD per share for Paypal, however the Paypal Board seems to have rejected that bid as too low.

The share price jumped to around 57 USD, leaving only a 5-6% spread. which indicates that some arb players seem to expect and price in an increased offer.

As it is quite early in the process, I will keep watching this. If the price goes down a bit and we would see a spread closer to 10%, this could be a potentially interesting special situation.

From a structural perspective, teaming up with Advent makes a lot of sense for Stripe because then they can choose exactly the parts that they like and Advents monetizes the rest. 

Advent also just has closed fundraising for its 11th flagship fund with a total of 26 bn USD in Commitments, so they do have some decent firepower.

Easyjet

Talking about increased offer: On June 29th, I had written about Castlelake’s attempt to take over Easyjet. Back then the stock was trading at 5,72 GBP and Castelake had increased its bid to 6,50 GBP.

On July 5th, Easyjet approved then an increased offer of 6,90 GBP. And only 2 days later, suddenly Apollo showed up with a 7,15 GBP bid.

Easyjet’s board quickly supported that offer and Apollo has now time until August 7th to come up with a formal bid.

So buying Easyjet back then would have been a good idea, but the Apollo move was clearly not easy foreseeable.

Interestingly, the spread this time is very small, so it seems market participants are expecting a higher counterbid from Castlelake.

In general, the UK market seems to be running hot with takeovers, Rotork/ABB is another example.

DCC

Finally a small update to DCC: KKR and DCC have now added a “Sweetener” to the deal: If DCC manages to sell its US Audio distribution business, shareholders will get an extra 1,25 GPB per share:

July 27th is now the new stop date for KKR to formalize the bid.

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