WideOpenWest (US: WOW) – last price 5.01 – last notes here

This afternoon, having rescheduled the conference call from AM to PM – what a tell that was, in retrospect – our long national nightmare is over, with the consummation of the WOW/Digitalbridge/Clearview merger for $5.20 per share announced (see here). In retrospect, much of the recent analysis was reasonably accurate, in that WOW was certainly pot committed to the deal, after an extremely elongated process; the evaporation of other credible buyers, and listed options; and having spent a king’s ransom on advisers and lawyers in the lead-up to the deal. On the other hand, some of the earlier analysis that led to the conviction in the position – namely that the buyer would be forced to give value to the equity for much of the greenfield, as-yet-unearning capex, and that shareholders would not accept a price unless it came with a significant bump to the original offer – turned out to be wrong. In sum, I am happy this got over the line, finally; and, probably like most shareholders at this point, at the same time relieved but slightly disappointed with the price.

I will leave the hand-wringing and self-analysis for another time – this turned into a mediocre investment outcome and whilst no means a disaster, there are certainly things that could have been done better here during the last 14 months. Still I think it is important not to over-generalize, or over-extrapolate; and the old adage ‘time kills all deals’ clearly was not correct, here at least, as in many ways this was a quintessential ‘n of 1’ situation. No doubt we will learn a lot more from the proxy, and perhaps I will comment again after reading that document.

I have taken the $5.01 on offer in the after-market, will now close this legacy position, and recycle the proceeds into other names that appear more attractive – within the names left in the model book, principally TFG.