I mean it's a pretty simple explanation: Because his strategy does not have a high beta(it isn't taking on SP500-like risk). SP500 may go down and a merger sti

I mean it's a pretty simple explanation: Because his strategy does not have a high beta(it isn't taking on SP500-like risk). SP500 may go down and a merger still goes through, or SP500 goes up and a merger falls through. Sure, general stock market conditions can influence merger completions(for example Musk wanted to pull out of Twitter buyout partially because he realized he overpaid) but in general mergers are not super correlated with SP500 performance. So it doesn't really make sense to compare the 2.