Who’s Going to Take Home the Trophy this Year?!
We only have two full weeks left in the second quarter and you know what that means….Not only do we have second quarter and first half of 2019 league tables to look forward to, but next week begins the Second Annual SPACInsider Underwriter’s League Tournament! Last year, Credit Suisse took home the prize, but this year looks to be extremely competitive. Truly. We had 46 SPACs price in 2018 and and there have been 26 deals so far in 2019, all of which will be used to calculate the rankings. With that many SPACs, it’s going to make for some interesting match-ups.
Additionally, same as last year, the winner will receive the SPACInsider Underwriter’s League Champion Award, sponsored by Refresh Creations. PLUS, the winning underwriting team gets t-shirts and hats of their choice!
All voting is 100% completely anonymous (we take anonymity seriously) and you will be able to find all the details, rules, rankings, etc., in the 2nd Annual Underwriters League Tournament page (to be posted at the end of this week). However, a preview of the rankings has been provided below. Additionally, you can see last year’s tournament HERE.
Rules
This is a tournament of the top 16 underwriters of 2018 and YTD 2019 combined, based on SPAC deal volume sold (found in the underwriter section of each final prospectus) and the number of SPAC deals completed. Each day will bring a new round of matches where a scenario is presented and you are asked to choose an underwriter. Voting is open for 23 hours for each match (ending every night at 11:59PM ET and posting new matches at 1:00AM ET) and the winners move on to the next day’s round. And just like last year’s tournament, there will be a bit of a twist…
Twist
The winners of each day carry their votes forward through each round. So for example, Underwriter A wins with 52 total votes in Round 1 and carries those votes through each successive round until the final match where it comes into play.
The final winner will ultimately be determined by total number of votes cast throughout the entire tournament, but to get to the final two, an underwriter HAS TO WIN their individual matches.
However, we will NOT be showing actual vote counts (only percentages), so by the time we get to the final round, you will not be able to tell who the winner is until we announce on Thursday.
Rankings
Once again, in an effort to make the rankings fair for everyone, we combined all of the League data from 2018 and added in YTD 2019. We then took the total combined deal volume sold for each underwriter and multiplied it by their total number of SPAC deals completed. That number is then sorted and ranked to determine the top 16 underwriters. Below is what the rankings currently look like, BUT if any deals price this week, we will add those amounts in. However, the cut-off is this coming Friday, June 21st. Any deals that price next week will not be counted in the rankings since the tournament begins on Monday, June 24th. These rankings will determine the initial match-ups, so for example, Cantor (ranked #1) will most likely be squaring off against Maxim (ranked #16).
A little healthy competition is always a good thing, so we hope you enjoy and participate in each day’s matches. So get going and make your picks on the SPAC SIXTEEN to see who will be….
the
ULTIMATE
SPAC
UNDERWRITER!!
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