Filed under: Private equity, Blackstone Group L.P (BX)

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a flood of special purpose acquisition company offerings (or SPACs). Basically, these are public companies that raise money to pursue acquisitions. It’s a way to provide targets with some liquidity as well as a public vehicle (to do things like buy other companies).

Well, today Alternative Asset Management Acquisition Corporation (AMEX: AMV) - which is an SPAC - announced that it is merging with Halcyon, which is an alternative asset manager (founded in 1981). The deal comes to about $974 million (including $505 million in cash and notes).

Halcyon, which manages $11.5 billion in assets, operates a variety of hedge funds. In fact, some of its strategies focus on “stressed/distressed” debt categories, which has become a popular spot lately.

Then again, as seen with other publicly-traded alternative assets managers - like Blackstone (NYSE: BX) and Och-Ziff Capital Management (NYSE: OZM) - it’s been challenging.

In today’s trading, Alternative Asset Management’s stock price is up about 2.15% to $9.50 (keep mind that the company went public at $10 per share).

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.