Research · Living data · Updated 2026-07-17
A living tracker of announced, closed, and terminated public-company deals — target, acquirer, value, and arb spread.
M&A is the purest event-driven asset class: a deal is announced, a spread opens, and it either closes or breaks. NextTrack tracks 14,665 public-company mergers and acquisitions across active, closed, and terminated statuses, of which about 2,457 are live right now. The counts refresh from SEC merger filings on every rebuild, so this tracker reflects the current deal slate rather than a stale list.
| Metric | Live figure |
|---|---|
| NextTrack tracks | 14,665 public-company mergers |
| Active / pending deals | 2,457 |
| Last updated | 2026-07-17 |
NextTrack keeps **active, closed, and terminated** deals in the same dataset, classified from filing history. Active deals are the live arbitrage universe. Closed deals are the historical record. Terminated deals are kept and labeled on purpose — a merger database that quietly deletes failed deals is useless for deal-break research, which is exactly the scenario an arbitrageur most needs to study.
For any deal with a defined cash price or exchange ratio, the **arb spread** is the gap between the current stock price and the deal consideration. A narrow spread signals the market's confidence the deal closes; a wide one signals doubt — regulatory risk, financing risk, or a possible topping bid.
The spread only means something next to the *probability of close*. A 3% spread on a near-certain strategic acquisition is more attractive than a 12% spread on a deal facing a second antitrust request, because the wide spread is compensation for real failure risk. NextTrack computes the live spread where the terms are extractable.
With roughly 2,457 active deals against 14,665 tracked, the live slate spans strategic acquisitions, private-equity buyouts, and SPAC combinations. The sample below shows this year's deals; the full tracker — with spread, structure, key dates, and deal-break history — is in the app.
Deals are sourced from SEC merger filings (8-K, DEFM14A, S-4), press releases, and exchange corporate-action feeds, then classified as active, closed, or terminated from filing history. For the SPAC-specific slice of this dataset, see the [2026 SPAC list](/research/spac-list-2026).
Mergers dataset & methodology · 2026 SPAC list & tracker · Activist investor campaigns 2026