Martin Marietta just agreed to pay thirteen and a half billion dollars for a company that sells limestone. Not rare earth minerals. Not lithium. Limestone. The stuff you can trip over in half the driveways in America.
Lhoist North America crushes rocks and sells them to people who need crushed rocks. This business model has existed since the Bronze Age. Martin Marietta looked at this operation and decided it was worth more than the GDP of Iceland.
The deal is cash-and-stock, which means Martin Marietta will hand over actual money and also some shares of itself. Lhoist will accept both forms of payment because apparently they believe Martin Marietta stock is worth something after Martin Marietta just proved it makes thirteen-billion-dollar decisions about limestone.
Retail traders will now spend six weeks arguing about whether this merger creates synergies. They will use the word synergies forty times without knowing what it means. Some guy in Wisconsin will put his entire Roth IRA into Martin Marietta calls expiring Friday because he saw a rocket emoji on Reddit next to the word limestone.
The technical chart shows none of this matters. Martin Marietta was going to do whatever Martin Marietta was going to do regardless of whether it bought Lhoist or a hundred thousand tons of gravel or a haunted quarry in Manitoba. The stock will move based on whether algos decide it should move. The merger is set dressing.
But sure, tell yourself this headline changes something. Tell yourself you can trade around it. Draw your support lines and your resistance levels and your Fibonacci retracements and pretend thirteen billion dollars for limestone means the chart will respect your stop loss.
It won't.
Photo by Luke Greenwood on Unsplash
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