“One billion dollars” sure has a nice ring to it . . .
. . . even when it bears no relation to Dr. Evil.
I have a few simple rules. One of them is that any time a company on our IPO Filings list plans an IPO worth $1 billion or more, I dig into it. Case in point: MF Global Ltd., which plans a nice, round offering of $1,000.0 in shares.
What’s that? Never heard of MF Global? I thought I hadn’t either, until I realized that this is the spinoff name of brokerage firm Man Financial, which is separating from its parent company, the hedge fund manager Man Group. So this new offering on the NYSE actually comes with a couple of centuries’ worth of history behind it. (James Man set up shop as a sugar broker in 1783.)
Category: Finance & Real Estate, IPOs2 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
Subscribe to the RSS Feed
MF Global is rumored to be primarily run by ex-Refco LLC management. After all the losses after Refco went bankrupt, I would be cautious about investing in MF Global.
Samson — Thanks for your comment, which intrigued me enough to go looking. (Whenever I hear “rumored,” I tend to fall back on the old proviso “Why guess when you can know?”)
At least from what I’m able to tell in the Hoover’s records on MF Global and Refco (this is a historical record that won’t be visible to you if you’re not a Hoover’s subscriber, there’s no overlap among the top executives of the two companies. Several of the MF Global execs are long-time veterans with Man Group (the company that’s spinning off MF Global), and the others are veterans of mainline financial firms like Bear Stearns and Barclays.
So at least from this quick thumbnail survey, the verdict seems to be that the rumors you’ve heard are unfounded.