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Monday, October 19, 2026

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We wrote about Bumble $BMBL as a potential deal situation we wanted to participate in for our August newsletter a few weeks ago and @compound248 has most of this right. Disclosure: I am long Bumble. Here is how the $1 billion acquisition value (if that number is correct) breaks down: Debt at the end of Q2 2026: $451 million Cash on the balance sheet: $154 million Net debt: $297 million Their recent debt refinancing required them to pay down $5 million of debt each month. The company generated over $50 million in free cash flow in Q2 2026, which was down from over $70 million in Q1 2026. Assuming they generated an additional $40 million in free cash flow in Q3 2026, net debt is probably closer to $260 million. This leaves $740 million for the equity portion of the deal. Common Class A shares outstanding: 131.86 million (as of June 30 from latest 10-Q) Common units (can be converted to class B shares): 21.25 million RSUs: 12.36 million I am not counting 1.42 million options because the vesting price is over $17. The 17 Class B shares are also a rounding error. Hence total diluted shares outstanding work out to approximately 165.47 million. The per share acquisition price works out to $4.47. Regarding the stock trading at a 8% discount to acquisition price, I will have to disagree because CEO Whitney Wolf Herd is supposed to roll over her equity and I don't see much antitrust risk. The average spread of the 79 active M&A transactions we are tracking is 3.96%. This includes deals like Western Union's $WU acquisition of International Money Express $IMXI that is trading at a spread of over 47% Normalized spreads excluding outliers are closer to 2%. I'll include parts of our August writeup about Bumble in the next tweet.

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