After a company answers an outside bid for its shares, do they beat the market over two weeks?
Study 53 · No reading (stopped by its own checks) · recorded 13 October 2026 · answer: Not settled · full paper with figures
The question
In an outside bid, a bidder offers to buy a company's shares at a stated price, and the company's board must answer within ten business days. We compare the shares with the market over ten sessions after that answer, asking whether they drift ahead as the gap to the offer price closes or behind as doubt about the deal grows.
Rules fixed before the result
Fixed in advance, before any return was computed: at least 100 answers by 90 companies, 150 ordinary dates for the spread, and a comparison able to detect a drift of three points over ten sessions by the plain mean or the mean with the most extreme 1% at each end pulled in to the 1st and 99th percentiles, none removed; else the study stops with no answer. No minimum or bar was changed, and the check was not run again.
Data and method
An answer is a listed company's first response to an outside bid in 90 days, dated 2014 to 2022, from the regulator's public filing indexes; the filings themselves were not read. Each company's return over the ten sessions after its answer was to be compared with the market's, the window cut at its last listed session when the shares were taken up, and set beside the same company's ordinary dates three, six and nine months before.
The answer
Not measured: the study stopped at its check of statistical power, before computing how any company's shares did after its answer. The plan required the comparison to be able to detect a drift of three percentage points over the ten sessions, by the plain mean or by the mean with the most extreme 1% at each end pulled in rather than removed, the method we fall back on; measured against the spread of the same companies' returns on ordinary dates before the offer, neither reached that precision, so by its own rule the study stopped there. The question is answered neither yes nor no. The registration expected a small drift ahead of the market, below three points, with low confidence, and gave a stop of any kind a chance of 0.07.
What it changes
No plan changed. By the plan's rule for this stop, whether a corrected design is written is decided next, and no rule or desk proposal changes on this record.
What remains uncertain
Nothing after an answer was measured, so neither a drift nor its absence is shown. The stop means the spread of these companies' returns on ordinary dates before the offer was wider than the plan could absorb, even with the most extreme 1% at each end pulled in. These companies' shares were not studied before; the acquirer side of the same kind of deal was read in earlier studies (studies twenty-three and thirty-nine) on other companies.