M&A Opportunity Screen

A data-driven screen for mid-market companies that carry the structural fingerprint of an acquisition target — then fact-checked for whether a deal is actually realistic. It ranks how much a company looks like a target; it is not a prediction that any transaction will occur.

We start from our covered US universe and narrow to clean, mid-market, consistently profitable, financeable businesses. Each survivor is scored across five dimensions — valuation, balance-sheet / LBO headroom, operational efficiency, capital-allocation discipline, and earnings quality — always measured relative to its industry peers, so a company that looks cheap or under-levered versus comparable businesses is what rises to the top. Every input is computed from raw financial statements.

A cheap business is only acquirable if its ownership allows it. We set aside names where control makes a clean deal unlikely (multiple voting classes, or a tightly-held register), and we weigh how the stock has performed against its peers, how concentrated its institutional ownership is, and how the market is positioned in it.

Each finalist is reviewed by an AI adjudicator against its financials, ownership, price action, forward estimates, the latest earnings call, and recent news — to judge whether an acquisition is genuinely plausible or the cheapness is a trap. It runs deterministically with strict anti-fabrication controls: every figure and quote must trace back to a source or it is removed, and a verdict that cannot be grounded is withheld from the list entirely.

For each target we assemble a vetted shortlist of real public companies that are both large enough to fund a deal and strategically adjacent to the target, and the model then names the most logical acquirers from that shortlist and flags deal risks such as antitrust or foreign-control review. It never invents a buyer — every name is a real company from the vetted shortlist or one actually reported in the news.

The numbers shown are recomputed daily from the latest prices, financials and ownership filings. The AI verdict is held steady while a company remains on the list and is re-assessed only when a name newly enters — so a target does not flip day to day on noise.

Sources: Trefis/Morningstar financials, SEC-sourced ownership, FINRA short interest, consensus estimates, earnings transcripts and news. A reasoned assessment of public susceptibility signals — not investment advice, and not a prediction that any transaction will occur. Full methodology available on request.