M&A Action

Takeover talk hasn't been this rampant in a long time:

L'Oreal has just revealed plans to buy Body Shop for £650m and Luminar, the UK's biggest nightclub operator, has received a takeover approach from Sarcens boss Nigel Wray. There was also news from Vodafone that it plans to return £6bn to its shareholders once it has completed the sale of its troubled Japanese business.

Both sides of the atlantic, markets have been heating up with buy-out talks. While this is rarely a good thing for the companies in the M&A process - most large-scale mergers and acquisitions, after all, are notoriously difficult to configure in terms of profitable value until a long time after - it bodes fantastically well for equity markets as a whole.