Acquisitions can turned into massive money losing events. As investors we should always be sceptical about things always working the way we want. Here is a nice plug from Firmex which shows some of the worse acquisition disasters : What investors can learn from this is to managed their expectations about acquisitions.

1. Are the company extending themselves
2. In the event that this fail, would it make the overall company a much poorer investement?
3. Has the company successfully acquired and integrate parcels of business before?
4. Would the financing put the company structure in a worse of state
5. Is the IRR provided by the management realistic?

Here you can see a lot of rushed acquisitions, not enough diligence done verifying the fundamental data. Locally I can remember OSIM acquisition of Brookstone being utterly bad. OSIM have come back strong, and i am sure they learnt a valuable lesson But not all will be so lucky to learn from ......