I'm getting several messages, to wit:

#1. Because the data show that over 80% of closed deals fail to earn back their cost of capital, these October 2016 deals, like others before them, are likely to be overpriced failures, too.

#2. The shareholders on the buy-side own a company whose moronic and overpaid hired hands in senior management would rather give away money to strangers (selling shareholders) than pay dividends to their long-suffering enlistee-investors who succumbed to their siren song to join the Trust-Me Army.

#3. The executives on the buy side and those on both sides of so-called 'mergers of equals' are dumber than dirt. If their IQs were one higher, they'd be vegetables. And if they were one lower, they'd be in Congress.

#4. The only winners in such transactions are (a) shareholders on the sell side (so long as the deal is for cash or, if it's not, so long as they immediately sell their new shares), and (b) the i-banking prostitutes responsible for getting the deal overpriced in the first place. Like other streetwalkers, the latter get paid only if there's a transaction. That creates an insane buy-side incentive: close the deal, no matter how bad it is for the client. And the data attest to the power of that incentive.

#5. I continue to be amazed that ANY corporate buyer would retain an i-banker. Such buyers might as well scarf down a half-dozen large doses of Ex-Lax because one thing is certain: they're gonna be cleaned out in ways they've never dreamed of. But, at least with Ex-Lax, their expectations will be realistic at the outset.