When the market price for a stock is below a tender offer's price, is it free money (riskless) to buy shares & tender them?
"It is not a ""riskless"" transaction, as you put it. Whenever you own shares in a company that is acquiring or being acquired, you should read the details behind the deal. Don't make assumptions just based on what the press has written or what the talking heads are saying. There are always conditions on a deal, and there's always the possibility (however remote) that something could happen to torpedo it. I found the details of the tender offer you're referring to. Quote: Terms of the Transaction [...] The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions, including   the valid tender of sufficient shares, which, when added to shares   owned by Men’s Wearhouse and its affiliates, constitute a majority of   the total number of common shares outstanding on a fully-diluted   basis. Any shares not tendered in the offer will be acquired in a   second step merger at the same cash price as in the tender offer. [...] Financing and Approvals [...] The transaction, which is expected to close by the third quarter of   2014, is subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions,   including expiration or termination of the applicable waiting period   under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Act.  Both Men’s Wearhouse and   Jos. A. Bank are working cooperatively with the Federal Trade   Commission to obtain approval of the transaction as soon as possible. [...] Essentially, there remains a small chance that one of these ""subject to..."" conditions fails and the merger is off. The chance of failure is likely perceived as small because the market price is trading close to the deal price. When the deal vs. market price gap is wider, the market would be less sure about the deal taking place. Note that when you tender your shares, you have not directly sold them when they are taken out of your account. Rather, your shares are being set aside, deposited elsewhere so you can no longer trade them, and later, should the conditions be satisfied, then you will be paid for your shares the deal price. But, should the deal fall apart, you are likely to get your shares deposited back into your account, and by that time their market value may have dropped because the price had been supported by the high likelihood of the transaction being completed. I speculated once on what I thought was a ""sure deal"": a large and popular Canadian company that was going to be taken private in a leveraged buyout by some large institutional investors with the support of major banks. Then the Global Financial Crisis happened and the banks were let off the hook by a solvency opinion. Read the details here, and here. What looked like a sure thing wasn't. The shares fell considerably when the deal fell apart, and took about four years to get back to the deal price." That price is the post-tender price, which already reflects arbitrage.  It's less than $65 on the market because that's the highest offer out there and the market price reflects the risk that the $65 will not be paid.  It also reflects the time value of money until the cash is disbursed (including blows to liquidity). In other words, you are buying the stock burdened with the risk that it might rapidly deflate if the deal falls through (or gets revived at a lower price) or that your money might be better spent somewhere other than waiting for the i-bank to release the tender offer amount to you. Two months ago JOSB traded around $55, and four months ago it traded around $50.  If the deal fails, then you could be stuck either taking a big loss to get out of the stock or waiting months (or longer) in the hope that another deal will come along and pay $65 (which may leave you with NPV loss from today).  The market seems to think that risk is pretty small, but it's still there. If the payout is $65, then you get a discount for time value and a discount for failed-merger risk.  That means the price is less than $65.  You can still make money on it, if the merger goes through.  Some investors believe they have a better way to make money, and no doubt the tender offer of the incipient merger of two publicly traded companies is already heavily arbitraged.  But that said, it may still pay off. Tender offer arbitrage is discussed in this article.
"Cart's answer describes well one aspects of puts: protective puts; which means using puts as insurance against a decline in the price of shares that you own.  That's a popular use of puts.  But I think the wording of your question is angling for another strategy: Writing puts. Consider: Cart's strategy refers to the buyer of a put.  But, on the transaction's other side is a seller of the put – and ultimately somebody created or wrote that put contract in the first place!  That first seller of the put – that is, the seller that isn't just selling one they themselves bought – is the put writer. When you write a put, you are taking on the obligation to buy the other side's stock at the put exercise price if the stock price falls below that exercise price by the expiry date.  For taking on the obligation, you receive a premium, like how an insurance company charges a premium to insure against a loss. Example:  Imagine ABC Co. stock is trading at $25.00.  You write a put contract agreeing to buy 100 shares of ABC at $20.00 per share (the exercise price) by a given expiration date.  Say you receive $2.00/share premium from the put buyer.  You now have the obligation to purchase the shares from the put buyer in the event they are below $20.00 per share when the option expires – or, technically any time before then, if the buyer chooses to exercise the option early. Assuming no early assignment, one of two things will happen at the option expiration date: ABC trades at or above $20.00 per share. In this case, the put option will expire worthless in the hands of the put buyer.  You will have pocketed the $200 and be absolved from your obligation.  This case, where ABC trades above the exercise price, is the maximum profit potential. ABC trades below $20.00 per share.  In this case, the put option will be assigned and you'll need to fork over $2000 to the put buyer in exchange for his 100 ABC shares.  If those shares are worth less than $18.00 in the market, then you've suffered a loss to the extent they are below that price (times 100), because remember – you pocketed $200 premium in the first place.  If the shares are between $18.00 to $20.00, you're still profitable, but not to the full extent of the premium received. You can see that by having written a put it's possible to acquire ABC stock at a price lower than the market price – because you received some premium in the process of writing your put.  If you don't ""succeed"" in acquiring shares on your first write (because the shares didn't get below the exercise price), you can continue to write puts and collect premium until you do get assigned. I have read the book ""Money for Nothing (And Your Stocks for FREE!)"" by Canadian author Derek Foster.  Despite the flashy title, the book essentially describes Derek's strategy for writing puts against dividend-paying value stocks he would love to own.  Derek picks quality companies that pay a dividend, and uses put writing to get in at lower-than-market prices.  Four Pillars reviewed the book and interviewed Derek Foster: Money for Nothing: Book Review and Interview with Derek Foster. Writing puts entails risk.  If the stock price drops to zero then you'll end up paying the put exercise price to acquire worthless shares!  So your down-side can easily be multiples of the premium collected.  Don't do this until and unless you understand exactly how this works.  It's advanced. Note also that your broker isn't likely to permit you to write puts without having sufficient cash or margin in your account to cover the case where you are forced to buy the stock.  You're better off having cash to secure your put buys, otherwise you may be forced into leverage (borrowing) when assigned.  Additional Resources: The Montreal Exchange options guide (PDF) that Cart already linked to is an excellent free resource for learning about options.  Refer to page 39, ""Writing secured put options"", for the strategy above. Other major options exchanges and organizations also provide high-quality free learning material:" At any point of time, buyer wants to purchase a stock at lesser price and seller wants to sell the stock at a higher price.  Let's consider this scenario  Company XYZ is trading at 100$, as stated above buyer wants to purchase at lower price and seller at higher price, this information will be available in Market depth, let's consider there are 5 buyers and 5 sellers, below are the details of their orders Buyers List Sellers List Highest order in buyers list will contain the bid price and bid quantity, Lowest order in Sellers list will contain the offer price and offer quantity. Now, if I want to buy 50 Stocks of company XYZ, need to place an order first, it can be either limit or Market. Limit Order : In this order, I will mention the price(buy price) at which I wish to buy, if there is any seller selling the stock less than or equal to price I have mentioned, then the order will be executed else it will be added to buyers list Market Order : In this order, I will not mention the price, if I wish to purchase 50 Stocks, then it will find the lowest offer price and buy stocks, in our case it will be 101. if I wish to purchase 200 Stocks, then it will find the lowest offer price and buy stocks, in our case it will be 2 transactions, since entire request cannot be accommodated in single order Usually the volume(Ask Volume and Offer Volume) being displayed are all Limit orders and not Market orders, Market orders are executed immediately. This is just an example, However several transactions are executed within a second, hence we will get to know the exact value only after the order is completed(executed) "Buying pressure is when there are more buy orders than sell orders outstanding.  Just because someone wants to buy a stock doesn't mean there's a seller ready to fill that order.  When there's buying pressure, stock prices rise.  When there's selling pressure, stock prices fall. There can be high volume where buying and selling are roughly equal, in which case share prices wouldn't move much. The market makers who actually fill buy and sell orders for stock will raise share prices in the face of buying pressure and lower them in the face of selling pressure.  That's because they get to keep the margin between what they bought shares from a seller for and what they can sell them to a new buyer for.  Here's an explanation from InvestorPlace.com about ""buying pressure"": Buying pressure can basically be defined as increasingly higher demand for a particular stock's shares. This demand for shares exceeds the supply and causes the price to rise. ... The strength or weakness of a stock determines how much buying or selling interest will be required to break support and resistance areas. I hope this helps!" "The market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares outstanding (of each stock class), times the price of last trade (of each stock class). In a liquid market (where there are lots of buyers and sellers at all price points), this represents the price that is between what people are bidding for the stock and what people are asking for the stock.  If you offer any small amount more than the last price, there will be a seller, and if you ask any small amount less than the last price, there will be a buyer, at least for a small amount of stock. Thus, in a liquid market, everyone who owns the stock doesn't want to sell at least some of their stock for a bit less than the last trade price, and everyone who doesn't have the stock doesn't want to buy some of the stock for a bit more than the last trade price. With those assumptions, and a low-friction trading environment, we can say that the last trade value is a good midpoint of what people think one share is worth.  If we then multiply it by the number of shares, we get an approximation of what the company is worth. In no way, shape or form does it not mean that there is 32 billion more invested in the company, or even used to purchase stock. There are situations where a 32 billion market cap swing could mean 32 billion more money was invested in the company: the company issues a pile of new shares, and takes in the resulting money.  People are completely neutral about this gathering in of cash in exchange for dilluting shares.  So the share price remains unchanged, the company gains 32 billion dollars, and there are now more shares outstanding. Now, in some sense, there is zero dollars currently invested in a stock; when you buy a stock, you no longer have the money, and the money goes to the person who no longer has the stock. The issue here is the use of the continuous tense of ""invested in""; the investment was made at some point, but the money doesn't really stay in this continuous state of being.  Unless you consider the investment liquid, and the option to take money out being implicit, it being a continuous action doesn't make much sense. Sometimes the money is invested in the company, when the company causes stocks to come into being and sells them. The owners of stocks has invested money in stocks in that they spent that money to buy the stocks, but the total sum of money ever spent on stocks for a given company is not really a useful value. The market capitalization is an approximation, which under the efficient market hypothesis (that markets find the correct price for things nearly instantly) is reasonably accurate, of the value the company has collectively to its shareholders.  The efficient market hypothesis isn't accurate, but it is an acceptable rule of thumb. Now, this value -- market capitalization -- is arguably not the total value of a company: other stakeholders include bond holders, labour, management, various contract counter-parties, government and customers.  Some companies are structured so that almost all value is captured not by the stock owners, but by contract counter-parties (this is sometimes used for hiding assets or debts). But for most large publically traded companies, it (in theory) shouldn't be far off." I assume you are talking about a publicly traded company listed on a major stock exchange and the buyer resides in the US. (Private companies and non-US locations can change the rules really a lot.) The short answer is no, because the company does not own the stock, various investors do. Each investor has to make an individual decision to sell or not sell. But there are complications. If an entity buys more than about 10% of the company they have to file a declaration with the SEC. The limit can be higher if they file an assertion that they are buying it solely for investment and are not seeking control of the company. If they are seeking control of the company then more paperwork must be filed and if they want to buy the whole company they may be required to make a tender offer where they offer to buy any and all shares at a specific price. If the company being bought is a financial institution, then the buyer may have to declare as a bank holding company and more regulations apply. The company can advise shareholders not to take the tender offer, but they cannot forbid it. So the short answer is, below 10% and for investment purposes only, it is cash and carry: Whoever has the cash gets to carry the stock away. Above that various regulations and declarations apply, but the company still does not have the power prevent the purchase in most circumstances. "There's no free lunch. Here are some positions that should be economically equivalent (same risk and reward) in a theoretically-pure universe with no regulations or transaction costs: You're proposing to buy the call. If you look at the equivalent, stock plus protective put, you can quickly see the ""catch""; the protective put is expensive. That same expense is embedded in the call option. See put-call parity on Wikipedia for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put%E2%80%93call_parity You could easily pay 10% a year or more for the protection, which could easily eat up most of your returns, if you consider that average returns on a stock index might be about 10% (nominal, not real). Another way to look at it is that buying the long call and selling a put, which is a synthetic long position in the stock, would give you the put premium. So by not selling the put, you should be worse off than owning the stock - worse than the synthetic long - by about the value of the put premium. Or yet another way to look at it is that you're repeatedly paying time value on the long call option as you roll it. In practical world instead of theory world, I think you'd probably get a noticeable hit to returns just from bid-ask and commissions, even without the cost of the protection. Options cost more. Digressing a bit, some practical complications of equivalency between different combinations of options and underlying are: Anyway, roughly speaking, any position without the ""downside risk"" is going to have an annual loss built in due to the cost of the protection. Occasionally the options market can do something weird due to supply/demand or liquidity issues but mostly the parity relationships hold, or hold closely enough that you can't profit once expenses are considered. Update: one note, I'm talking about ""vanilla"" options as traded in the US here, I guess there are some somewhat different products elsewhere; I'm not sure exactly which derivatives you mean. All derivatives have a cost though or nobody would take the other side of the trade." Question: are you saying that buying a call is better than buying a vertical spread regardless of fees, or only because of fees? If the former, you are saying that buying a call and selling a vertical spread will always be profitable, which effectively means you're going short an out-of-the-money call. While that's a good strategy, it doesn't guarantee profit, and will lose money exactly when the vertical spread is a better strategy than buying the call outright. The most direct answer to your question in comments: if the stock goes down, you lose less money with the vertical spread than you do with a simple call. In return for this lower risk, you give up gains if the stock goes above the higher calls strike price. For a deep in the money, it almost makes no difference because the intrinsic value, the price of the option, is seldom far above the liquidation value, the price of the underlying less the strike price. For an at the money, ceteris paribus, an early exercise would immediately cut the value of the option to 0; however, life is not so simple as JB King has shown. Purely theoretically, for an at or near the money option, an early exercise will be an instantaneous cost because the value after exercise is less than the previously trading or implied option price.