Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) released its 10Q during trading hours on thursday. The company said, it received a notice of default from JPMorgan and did not have enough cash to repay debts of more than $1bn to the lender.
As of November 26th, the company had $225.7m cash according to its financial statements.
BBBY also warned at the start of January that its business was struggling and it was considering alternative options options including asset sales and filing for bankruptcy protection. It struggled to acquire inventory for the winter holidays, and said customer traffic had slowed, reporting a net loss of $393m during its fiscal third quarter.
Following the filing, the stock plunged almost 30% to $2.01 (day’s low) recovering to $2.52 at the end of the session; down 22%.
Rumours of a merger/acquisition was the chatter among the retail crowd in Reddit groups. Some even speculate that Ryan Cohen is about to buy all the stocks. His tweet on Jan 18th fuelled this theory further.
Following the 10Q, although some felt it dashed these hopes., hidden text found on the latest 10Q sparked further speculation. A paragraph was found hidden on page 16/17 of the filing mentioning ‘merger’.
While digging deeper, we found hidden text in 52 pages of the entire report;
This could have been an easter egg or a genuine human error, where header and footer notes that aren’t intended for public eyes; got into the document.
Merger or not, an announcement is imminent.
