Knight Capital Group's board was split between two competing offers for the firm after a meeting on Monday where suitors Getco Holding Company LLC and Virtu Financial LLC presented their sweetened offers to Knight's directors, sources involved in the talks said. By late Monday, Knight had not reached a decision on which offer to accept, as it weighed different structures of the bids as well as the motivations of some of its own investors, according to one of the sources. Still, a deal of some kind for the electronic trading firm was increasingly looking more likely than not, the source added.Getco recently increased the amount of cash to its cash-and-stock offer for Knight, which executes around 10 percent of U.S. equity trading volume, valuing it around $1.8 billion, while Virtu boosted its all-cash bid to $3.20 a share, or around $1.6 billion, the source said.Chicago-based Getco's deal would see it merge into Knight to create a new publicly traded company, whereas Virtu would take Knight private.Jefferies Group Inc, which helped lead a rescue of Knight earlier this summer and became a major investor, is helping to finance Getco's bid, leading some at Knight to question whether it was merely looking to take profits from the investment, the source said. Jefferies was also instrumental in bringing Getco into the investor group at the time, the source said.
Knight Capital Group, Inc. is a United States-based company that provides financial services. Shares of KCG traded higher by 0.62% or $0.02/share to $3.26. In the past year, the shares have traded as low as $2.24 and as high as $13.59. On average, 3757970 shares of KCG exchange hands on a given day and today's volume is recorded at 1507822.
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