A lot of companies seem interested in ABN Amro (NYSE: ABN), or, at least, some of its pieces. Barclays (NYSE: BCS) made the first bid for ABN, and then Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) made plans to buy the LaSalle Bank division in the US.

Royal Bank of Scotland put together a group of financial institutions which upped the bid to €71.4 billion. Fortis and Santander, the other major banks in their group, would each have taken pieces of ABN.

Now, Barclays is thinking of improving its offer by upping the cash portion of the deal. According to the FT: "The introduction of cash would appeal to the hedge funds that hold a big proportion of ABN Amro's shares."

The battle between the banks to own ABN raises a question about whether bidding too high could hurt Barclays down the road. ABN's shares are up 30% since the bidding began. If the Barclays bid is reasonable, investors would have to assume that the market was undervaluing ABN by a very significant margin.

If the value of ABN was pegged correctly before the offers began, Barclays could be walking into a huge problem.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Will Barclays up its offer for ABN Amro? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Private equity firms, hedge funds, and investment banks are always looking for hidden values in public shares. It is no accident that an investor like Carl Icahn buys into Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT). He thinks the company's intrinsic value is well above the stock price.

24/7 Wall St. has begun to take a look at the break-up values of a number of large cap companies. Firms with market caps of over $100 billion have been kept off the list because they are likely to be too large for private equity buy-outs. But the companies on this list may well end up as targets. The full explanation of the methodology is here.

Some of the notable public firms with differences between the break-up value and current stock price include:

Continue reading Stock prices re-examined: Break-up values for Apple, Disney, eBay, and more

Stock prices re-examined: Break-up values for Apple, Disney, eBay, and more originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.