5xEBITDA

How will any of this value ever be recognized aside from someone deciding it should trade at a higher multiple? Seems very dependent on someone else taking a view on value as opposed to things working themselves out.

Sounds good! Don't mean to imply you haven't thought of this, but I always bake in $50,000 liquidation expenses and run the yield calc + 10 business days past the redemption date to get a "true' yield to worst on this stuff just to be safe even though 1) there won't be liquidation expenses incurred in a regular way redemption and 2) it likely won't take all ten days to get $ back to you

Please see bold

Just set an alert for 8Ks to go to your email for the SPACs you're invested in and you should be good. There are free services out there

You can probably just call the SPAC's transfer agent (most likely Continental) and request they split the units yourself.

Does your broker charge you for other corporate actions? They should not be charging you for this, it is just the click of a button. They don't typically. But I guess they wanted to get in on the SPAC gold rush too... I think that's ridiculous and would escalate the issue as high as you can. Will they charge you when you have to make an election to redeem or not? Or how you want to vote on a deal?

Does your broker charge you for other corporate actions? They should not be charging you for this, it is just the click of a button.

10 business days following the actual notice of redemption at the special meeting of shareholders.

Look on the bright side, you will be able to trade Jo-Ann after it IPOs next week

Answered your questions in bold. But yeah, buying short term spacs below trust is the classic arb in the space.

The equity is worthless here. Bond maturities aren't the problem, the problem is they can't file financials with the SEC which is a violation of their bond covenants. They have been operating under a waiver / grace period for several months and are in the process of negotiating an in court restructuring (Chapter 11). Management swears the financial issues are limited to accrual accounting related to several large acquisitions they did and is not a cash receipt / disbursement problem, but the market is probably rightly suspicious of this. They have an LOI (or PSA) signed for their European infrastructure business, this part of the Company is not asset-lite, that will fetch them about $2 billion. Proceeds will be used to repay debt at European subsidiaries as well as a bridge loan they obtained from bank lenders. Bonds are suing the Company saying they actually have a priority claim on European asset sale proceeds. If they slip into bankruptcy this issue becomes much more complicated. At the end of the day the point is that zero of this benefit will accrue to the equity. Absent the European infrastructure, this is not a good business you'd want to own which is another problem as reflected by the price of the bonds. There may be some option value in the equity worth punting around based on process-related catalysts, but I would stay away or invest elsewhere in the capital structure.

I'd be very surprised if Pete did something wrong here.

He plainly states in more than several of his videos that the stock had a very high short interest and a short squeeze could happen. I think he's still under investigation, which doesn't really bode well for him since its not like he only ever talked about the fundamentals and the short squeeze was a surprise.

I agree with this, but am curious how much skin the game a sponsor would typically have? Between d&o insurance, underwriting, listing fees would the sponsors typically be putting up say 5% of the amount raised? Be curious for any rule of thumb... Yes, typically it is 4-8% of the amount raised. So, unless the sponsor funds their investment out of an existing PE or HF vehicle, I think its fair to say they have a good amount of skin in the game. If they are funding with LP $s then the promote is really for the benefit of the LPs and the GP maintains their existing fee terms.

It's less of a "finders" fee and more of a "success" fee. People like to talk about how if the SPAC doesn't find a target, or the investor doesn't like the target, they can redeem their money and get everything back, even in a liquidation. In a liquidation, the sponsor loses all their money. So the promote is really compensation for assuming all of the downside risk in the event they liquidate. It's not perfect, but the risk/reward profiles are very different for the sponsor vs. investor and I do think its appropriate for the sponsor to have higher economics because of this. However, 20% may be high.