When I wrote about Asta Funding last month I thought it was a nice little arbitrage with little risk, but also limited upside given that the spread was just 3.8%. While surprises when doing merger arbitrage are usually bad news, I got lucky with Asta Funding. Their largest outside investor, RBF Capital, announced that they thought that the going private offer of $11.47/share was significantly too low and that they would oppose the deal. A month later they upped their game with a going private proposal of their own at $13/share.

The stock is now trading at $12.50/share, but given that 61.8% of the outstanding shares are owned by Asta Funding insiders this proposal has a very low chance of becoming reality. However, with a 8.8% stake RBF Capital owns a decent bit of the float and getting a majority of the minority to approve the proposed transaction might become difficult. 8.8% of the shares is just 23% of the float, but there are always a bunch of people that just don’t vote (and effectively vote against the deal) and there might be more than a few holders sympathetic to RBF Capital’s argument that the going private price is a lowball offer.

But it is far from certain that RBF Capital’s efforts will lead to a significantly improved offer from Asta Funding insiders. There are many alternative scenarios possible. Insiders could simply abandoning the going private proposal and go back to business as usual. Alternatively RBF Capital could just be posturing for an eventual appraisal case that would offer no free ride for other minority investors. And of course it’s totally possible that a lot is said and done and in the end the original proposal goes through. When the stock was trading close to the buy-out price of $11.47 I was happy to hold on to see how things would play out, but at the current prices I think the market is pretty optimistic so I decided to exit.

Disclosure

Author has no position in Asta Funding anymore