US equity markets closed Friday’s (29 November) abbreviated session post the Thanksgiving Day holiday lower as investors continued to monitor developments on the US-China's trade front as Washington's 15 December deadline for a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese goods nears - Dow down -113-points or -0.40% The broader S&P500 -0.40%, NASDAQ -0.46%. In merger and acquisition (M&A) news, Tech Data Corp jumped 12% after the company’s board unanimously accepted the amended offer of US$145 per share offer from private-equity group Apollo Global Management. Tech Data’s. Globally, 2019 is already the sixth best year of the past twenty in terms of M&A totals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The 26,321 pending and completed transactions announced this year total US$2.73 trillion and compare to the 30,225 transactions amounting to US$3.0T trillion last year. A surge of deals in the past week have added more than US$70B to the total, including Charles Schwab Corp’s US$26B  buyout of discount broking peer TD Ameritrade Holding Corp; luxury goods giant LVMH Moet Hennesy Louis Vuiiton’s US$16.2B move on Tiffany & Co; and Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG’s US$9.7B purchase of the maker of cholesterol drugs, Medicines Company.