M&A Activity — Complete Guide

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What it is

M&A Activity is a deal-tracking workspace for mergers, acquisitions, buybacks, and related corporate transactions. It works two ways from the same screen: look up one company and see every deal it has ever touched — split by whether it was the buyer or the one being bought, plus who it deals with most and how its activity trends over time — or open the Global Market Activity screener and watch the newest deals across the entire market, filtered to what you care about. Every deal carries the detail a professional needs to act on it: the parties, the value and the stake acquired, the status (from rumor through completion), the deal type, the advisors on each side, and a dated event timeline. The deal data comes from LSEG’s SDC Platinum M&A database — the institutional deal-and-league-table source long known as Refinitiv/Thomson Reuters SDC Platinum — covering global transactions back to the 1960s. Find it under News & Events → M&A Activity (aliases: “Mergers & Acquisitions”, “deals”, “deal activity”).

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When to use it

Reach for M&A Activity when your question is about transactions — who bought whom, on what terms, and where a deal stands:

• Track a specific company’s deal history — “What has NVIDIA acquired?”, “Has this company ever been a takeover target?”, “Is there a pending or rumored deal on it right now?”
• Map a whole corporate family — roll up every subsidiary under one parent (e.g. all of Alphabet’s deals, Google and otherwise) into a single deduplicated feed.
• Scan the market — “What are the largest deals announced this week?”, “Show me every $1B+ deal in the last 90 days”, “What’s pending across the market right now?”
• Understand a single transaction — its value, the stake acquired, who advised each side, the consideration, and how it has progressed.
• See who a company deals with — its most frequent counterparties, and how often it sits on the buy side versus the sell side.
• Find an advisory firm’s deal flow — a league-table-style list of every deal a given bank or advisor worked on (ask the AI assistant for this — see below).

When to use something else instead:

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How to use it

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Scanning the whole market (Global Market Activity)

The Global Market Activity tab is a firehose of the newest deals across all sectors and geographies — hundreds arrive each day. Tune it with:

• Window — 24H, 7D, 30D (default), 90D, or 1Y.
• Status — All, Completed, Pending, or Withdrawn.
• Minimum value — a “USD MM ≥” floor (e.g. enter 1000 to see only $1B+ deals).
• Refresh — re-pull the latest, and Load more to page through additional deals.

The market feed reaches back over the last 5 years; deeper history is available through the per-company, parent, and single-deal views.

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Capabilities & key choices

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The six tabs

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Deal status (where a deal stands)

Source labels are rewritten into plain English. The main states you’ll see:

• Completed / Unconditional — the deal closed (“Unconditional” is the UK/Australia term for closed).
• Pending (incl. Pending due to regulatory reasons) — announced and in progress.
• Intended — board-approved intent (often a buyback) not yet formally offered; shown as “Board-approved, not yet announced”.
• Partially Completed — partially closed.
• Seeking Buyer — the company is exploring strategic alternatives.
• Withdrawn / Sub-bid withdrawn / Seeking Buyer Withdrawn — the deal or a bid was abandoned.
• Rumor (unconfirmed) — media reports exist but no formal announcement.
• Rumor (denied by target) — the target formally denied it; the deal will not happen.

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Deal type (“Form”)

The deal’s form tells you what kind of transaction it is — for example Merger, Acquisition, Acquisition of Majority / Partial / Remaining Interest, Acquisition of (Certain) Assets, Recapitalization, Exchange Offer, or Buyback (share repurchases, de-emphasized so they don’t crowd out true M&A).

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Attitude & technique flags

Each deal can also carry an attitude (Friendly, Hostile, Neutral, Unsolicited) and one or more technique flags that characterize the structure — e.g. Divestiture, Spinoff, Splitoff, Tender Offer, Self-Tender, Secondary Buyout, Restructuring, or buyer-type markers like Financial Sponsor, LBO Firm, SPAC, White Knight, or Hedge Fund Involved.

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Economics terms

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What it can access & produce

Inputs / sources it draws on:

• LSEG SDC Platinum M&A data — global mergers, acquisitions, buybacks, tender offers, and related transactions, back to the 1960s, with millions of deals on file. Each record includes the parties (target, acquiror, the legal merger vehicle when one is used, and ultimate parents), economics, status lifecycle, advisors, and a dated event history.
• Companies are found by name, and a typed ticker is resolved to the right company through a curated reference (shown as a “Curated match” in the header when used).

What it produces / hands off:

• On screen — company deal dashboards, sortable/filterable deal tables, per-deal detail, a counterparties leaderboard, and a market-wide screener.
• To the AI assistant — a single deal or a filtered deal list packaged as ready-to-discuss context (via Add to AI Chat), complete with a plain-language legend so the assistant understands the terminology.
• In each deal panel — the advisors split into To Target and To Acquiror, and the deal’s event timeline, for due-diligence and league-table work.

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Tips & best practices

• Use the parent rollup for big groups. Searching a conglomerate by one legal name misses deals filed under subsidiaries. The Parent rollup gives the complete, deduplicated picture.
• Hide rumors when you want only confirmed activity. Toggle them off in the company header so KPIs, charts, and tables reflect real deals only.
• Lead with value on the market screener. Set a “USD MM ≥” floor (e.g. 1000) before widening the window, or the feed’s volume will bury the deals that matter.
• Sort As Acquiror by value to instantly see a company’s biggest bets; sort As Target by date to see whether it’s recently in play.
• Send the list, not just one deal. When you want the assistant to compare a set (e.g. all of a company’s deals, or a sector’s recent transactions), use Add to AI Chat from the table so it has the whole set.
• Read the year chart’s tooltips. Hovering a year names that year’s largest deal and shows the status split — a fast way to spot the company’s defining transactions.
• Check the event timeline for pending deals to see regulatory and procedural milestones, not just the current status.

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Limits & things to know

• Coverage is global and deep, but deal-database-defined. It reflects what SDC Platinum tracks; very small, private, or unreported transactions may not appear, and figures are as the database records them.
• The market feed covers the last ~5 years. Older deals are reachable through a company, its parent, or a single-deal lookup, not the market-wide tape.
• A company view loads up to ~2,000 of its deals. Ample for almost every company; extremely prolific acquirers may have more on file than the screen loads at once.
• The market screener pages in batches. It loads an initial page (hundreds to a few thousand by window) and pages with Load more up to a browsing cap of about 25,000 rows — narrow the filters to reach specific older deals beyond that.
• Rumors are shown by default in company views (with a toggle). Don’t mistake a “Rumor (denied by target)” row for a completed deal.
• Freshness: the market feed is near-real-time (refreshes every few minutes; use Refresh), and company and deal data update on a daily cycle.
• “Counterparties” are companies, not advisors. The Counterparties tab ranks the other companies in a firm’s deals. The advisory banks and law firms appear inside each individual deal’s panel.
• This screen has one outbound link. Aside from Add to AI Chat, M&A Activity doesn’t navigate to the equities page, watchlist, news, or other features — you move between them yourself (or via the assistant).

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How it works with other features

Feeds out of M&A Activity:

• → Chat / Agent Studio — the one wired handoff. Add to AI Chat drops a deal (or a filtered deal list) into the assistant with full context, so you can analyze, compare, or research without re-keying anything.

Available to the AI assistant directly (no screen needed): The same M&A database is exposed to the Chat and research assistant as a full set of tools. In research mode it’s always available; in quick chat it activates as soon as your message mentions deal language (“merger”, “acquisition”, “takeover”, “buyout”, “pending deal”, “deal advisor”, and so on). You can ask the assistant to retrieve:

• a company’s full deal history, or a whole corporate family’s,
• a market-wide deal screen (by date window, status, and minimum value),
• a single deal’s complete record and terms,
• the advisors on a deal, split by side,
• a deal’s event timeline,
• every deal a given advisory firm worked on (the league-table view the screen itself doesn’t render), and
• entity/ticker resolution.

Every assistant M&A answer is source-tracked, so the figures it quotes can be cited back to the deal record. Combine with (you move between these): Equities/company data and News for valuation and context on each name; Live Investor Relations for management’s own words on a deal; Document Search / Data Room for the underlying filings; Grids to build a precedent-transactions comparison; Reports to write the analysis up; Watchlist to monitor names you found in play.

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Example workflows

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1. Spot a deal → research the rationale → brief the desk

1. M&A Activity → Global Market Activity: filter to large, pending deals this week (Status = Pending, USD MM ≥ 1000).
2. Open the deal that matters and click Add to AI Chat.
3. Chat: ask the assistant to explain the strategic rationale, then to pull the acquirer’s other recent acquisitions and any pending deals (it uses the M&A tools directly) to reveal an M&A pattern.
4. Chat: layer in the acquirer’s financials and recent News for context, and ask for a short thesis.
5. Reports: generate a brief from the thread to circulate.

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2. Sector deal sweep → comparison Grid → Report

1. M&A Activity: open a sector bellwether (or its Counterparties tab) to see who’s buying whom; switch to Global Market Activity and filter to the sector’s recent large deals.
2. Use the table’s Add to AI Chat to hand the filtered sector deals to the assistant — or just ask it for “all $500M+ semiconductor deals since January”.
3. Grids: build a precedent-transactions grid — columns like target, acquirer, date, deal value, % acquired, premium, status — and let the assistant populate rows from the M&A data.
4. Equities/company data + News: add valuation and context columns per name.
5. Reports: roll the grid and analysis into a comps/precedents section.

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3. Diligence on a name you hold or watch

1. From a name on your Watchlist or its Equities page, come to M&A Activity and search it to see whether it’s ever been a target or acquirer, or is subject to a pending/rumored deal.
2. Open the relevant deal and Add to AI Chat; ask the assistant to summarize terms, advisors, and status.
3. Live Investor Relations + Document Search: reconcile the deal terms against management’s disclosures and the actual filings.
4. Track progress through the deal’s event timeline, and set a Report or watchlist note to monitor close versus break.

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4. Advisor / counterparty intelligence (banker workflow)

1. M&A Activity: use the Counterparties tab on a company to see who it transacts with most.
2. Chat: ask for every deal a specific advisory firm worked on, filtered by year and status — a quick league table.
3. Grids + Reports: rank advisors by deal count and value, and write it up for a pitch or coverage memo.
4. Equities/company data: size each counterparty as a potential future buyer or seller.

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Common questions

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Getting help

If a deal looks wrong, a company won’t resolve, or you want help designing a deal-screening or precedent-transactions workflow, reach the team through the in-app support option or your account team. For a guided walkthrough, book a session from the Help link in the top navigation.