Gordon Haskett wonders if Guardant could be ‘shoehorned’ into Agilent search

Gordon Haskett’s head of event-driven research, Don Bilson, said in a note to investors that "M&A signals coming out of Agilent (A) have been getting stronger since the company reported its Q4 results," quoting CEO Mike McMullen as having stated yesterday during a Goldman healthcare conference: "We’ve historically focused on the private sector, but there now are some interesting things that have us looking in the public space as well. There’s some companies out there that have been kind of beaten down, but maybe unjustifiably … So we’re more open to doing public deals and we would do continue to do it on a friendly basis now." With that as context, Bilson questions if "a liquid biopsy specialist like Guardant (GH), which fell 27% on December 16 and now has market cap of $2.7bn, be shoehorned into A’s search universe?"