Hiya orangehunter! Despite my blindness, I notice that you are...

Hiya orangehunter!
Despite my blindness, I notice that you are not a holder either so (perhaps a groundless assumption) I assume that we must agree about some things. By the way, making disparaging personal remarks about posters who do not share your opinions is not constructive to informed debate.

I haven't seen the article because it is paywalled.

If Openmarkets is seeking a merger partner then does it have some issues that may be of a financial nature? (Sorry about this assumption, perhaps it is the other way round.) If Openmarkets has some issues, then if it does not find a merger partner or otherwise solve its issues then there must be some possibility that further down the track it might be forced to cease trading. If this were to happen then SWF would no longer be able to process trades for the ASX. One reason why the collapse of the merger negotiations is unlikely to be positive for SWF, and hence for its share price, is that a merger would have provided greater certainty for SWF.

Did the article mention anything about whether Openmarkets thought that SWF was overvalued or not? And the apparent conflict of interest would have been wellknown to all the parties long before the start of the negotiations. So, did the article provide any details about what the negotiations were really about? - because it seems odd for them to have been negotiating about a merger if there was a fundamental obstacle to any merger that they all already knew about.

There are more questions than answers. More facts please, and less of the disparaging personal remarks.