A pulp mill with a $17 million market cap is exchanging roughly $1.1 billion of Senior Notes for equity. Hold that ratio in your head before admiring the $MERC +126.19% that followed it, in the first regular session trading Monday evening's recapitalization agreement.
The release counts what the company gets: debt cut by 88%, holders of over 87% of the notes signed on, a majority of shareholders too, and $400 million in n— the feed's summary stops mid-word, so this desk stops there as well. What it does not count out loud is who owns the mill afterward. A billion-plus of paper is becoming stock in a company the market priced at seventeen million yesterday. The noteholders are not being paid off; they are being paid in the company, and what fraction of it the old common keeps is the one number the summary does not carry. A majority of shareholders agreed to that anyway, which tells you what they thought the alternative looked like.
Mercer has exactly one prior session in the file that opened at least 5% above the previous close, which is an anecdote with a ticker on it, so the only history worth stating is cross-stock: 3,383 prior sessions where any stock above a dollar opened at least 30% up. Thirty-four percent closed above that open; the median finished 7.29% below it. That describes a crowd of gap mornings, not this agreement, and not tomorrow.
The 88% is a press-release number tonight. The percentage the old common keeps is a closing-document number, and the file does not have it yet.