{
  "@context": "https://frontierpicks.com/schemas/dossier.v1.json",
  "ticker": "CCRN",
  "name": "Cross Country Healthcare, Inc.",
  "url": "https://frontierpicks.com/dossiers/CCRN/",
  "json_url": "https://frontierpicks.com/dossiers/CCRN.json",
  "status": "DORMANT",
  "current_conviction": "LOW",
  "graded_conviction": null,
  "archetype": {
    "code": "a5",
    "n": 5
  },
  "current_thesis": "Situation settled: the Knox Lane take-private became effective 2026-07-21 at $13.25 cash, Nasdaq suspended trading that morning and filed Form 25 the same day. No listed security, no residual claim, no forward catalyst — any CCRN bar dated after 2026-07-21 is stale vendor data.",
  "invalidation_trigger": "A daily close below $13.25 cannot print: the common stock was suspended from Nasdaq before the 2026-07-21 open, Nasdaq filed Form 25 that day, and each share converted into the right to receive $13.25 cash. The situation is terminated — no listed security, no dated catalyst ahead.",
  "catalyst_date": null,
  "outcome": "OPEN",
  "outcome_date": null,
  "invalidation_fired": null,
  "themes": [
    "m-and-a-special-situations",
    "managed-care-health-services"
  ],
  "tags": [],
  "sources": [],
  "notes": [
    "Common stock was suspended from Nasdaq on 2026-07-21; any CCRN quote or indicator dated after that is a stale-data artifact, not a live market.",
    "Each share converted into the right to receive $13.25 cash; unexchanged holders claim through the paying agent and hold no ongoing equity interest.",
    "The locums division was sold to All Star Healthcare Solutions, a Knox Lane portfolio company, at closing — the private entity is not the pre-deal business mix.",
    "Reporting obligations were being terminated via Form 15 as of the 2026-07-21 8-K; no date was disclosed and no further public financials should be expected.",
    "The earlier Aya Healthcare deal at $18.61/share was terminated 2025-12-03 on antitrust timing; the Knox Lane agreement is the one that closed."
  ],
  "body_markdown": "## Current Thesis\nThe merger-arb closed out by completion, not by break. The Knox Lane take-private became effective **2026-07-21**: each share converted into the right to receive **$13.25 in cash**, Nasdaq suspended trading before the open that morning, and Nasdaq filed **Form 25** the same day to remove the listing; the company stated it intends to file Form 15 to terminate registration and suspend reporting (no date disclosed). Six directors — Kevin C. Clark, W. Larry Cash, Venkat Bhamidipati, Dwayne Allen, Gale Fitzgerald and Janice Nevin — resigned effective 2026-07-21, and Joel Tremblay was appointed CEO of the private entity. The last completed daily close in the graded series is **$13.25 on 2026-07-20**, the day before suspension. There is no listed security left to price, no earnings date, no filing calendar.\n\n**The narrative is dead**, dated **2026-07-21**. The site's dead label normally covers a failed narrative; here the structure is gone for the arithmetically opposite reason — the binary resolved in favour of completion and the equity was extinguished. Either path produces the same thing for a reader: nothing tradable.\n\n## Bull Case\n- **The deal closed at par, as the spread implied.** Consideration was **$13.25/share cash**, ~$437M, agreed **2026-05-06** at a 31% premium to that day's close, and consummated **2026-07-21**. Holders of record on the effective date have a cash claim through the paying agent; unexchanged certificates are an administrative matter, not a market exposure.\n- **Every gate cleared in sequence.** HSR waiting periods for both the merger and the carve-out of the locums business to All Star Healthcare Solutions expired **2026-06-22** with no second request; stockholders adopted the merger agreement on **2026-07-16** with **23,356,105 for, 12,309 against, 10,439 abstentions**. The antitrust failure mode that killed the prior Aya Healthcare deal (terminated 2025-12-03, $18.61/share) did not recur with a financial sponsor.\n- **Equity awards were cashed out at the deal price.** Restricted stock fully vested, was cancelled and converted at $13.25; performance awards vested at the greater of target and actual performance and converted at $13.25. The ABL credit agreement dated 2019-10-25 was discharged and terminated concurrently with closing.\n\nNone of this is a forward case. It is the settlement record of a situation that is over.\n\n## Bear Case\n- **There is no residual equity claim and no way to express a view.** Post-2026-07-21 there is no US-listed common stock, no quote, no float, no borrow. Any CCRN daily bar dated after the suspension is a vendor artifact.\n- **The private entity is not the pre-deal business.** The locums division went to All Star Healthcare Solutions, a Knox Lane portfolio company, at closing. Whatever the remaining workforce-solutions business earns is unobservable once Form 15 suspends reporting.\n- **The last public fundamentals were contracting.** Q1-2026 (reported 2026-05-07): revenue **$241.1M, -17.8% YoY** against $293.4M; net loss **$4.3M**, **-$0.14** per share. That deterioration is the read-across a listed peer inherits, and it is the last datapoint this company will publish.\n- **Merger-objection litigation was live into the close** — two stockholder suits plus demand letters over proxy disclosure, denied by the company and answered with supplemental DEFA14A disclosures; a plaintiff firm publicly renewed its investigation on 2026-07-15. Post-closing residue of that kind resolves in court, not in a share price.\n\n## Setup & Price Structure\n- **Terminal print: $13.25 on 2026-07-20**, exactly the merger consideration. The series stops there; suspension came before the 2026-07-21 open.\n- **The momentum readings are arithmetic residue, not a live tape.** RSI(14) 70.0, three-month return +33.0%, -6.9% from the 52-week high of $14.23 — all of that is the re-rating from roughly $10 pre-announcement to a pinned $13.2x band after 2026-05-06, frozen by the delisting. An RSI reading on a series that ended describes nothing forward.\n- **The $14.23 52-week high sits above the deal price.** Inference, not a filed fact: a print above $13.25 could not occur once the cash agreement was public, so that high belongs to the pre-2026-05-06 tape. No base formed after the announcement and none can now.\n- the ownership register had concentrated into deal-completion holders by the 2026-07-16 record, which is the normal end-state of a merger book and the reason the tape carried no two-way flow into the close. There is no upcoming earnings date to crowd into and no insider transactions to watch; management equity was cashed at $13.25 by contract.\n\n## Catalyst Calendar (next 30 days)\n\n- **None.** There is no dated corporate event for the common stock in the window ending 2026-09-15 — no earnings print, no shareholder meeting, no regulatory decision, because reporting obligations were being terminated as of the 2026-07-21 closing.\n\n## Elapsed catalysts\n\n- **2026-07-21 (elapsed)** — merger effective; Form 25 filed by Nasdaq; trading suspended. This is the event the calendar was built around and it has passed. *(passed 36d ago)*\n- **Form 15 filing — no date disclosed.** The 2026-07-21 8-K states an intent to file; the company did not publish a date, and no date should be assumed. *(passed 36d ago)*\n\n## What Would Change Our Mind\nWhat would reopen this is a reversal of the closing itself — an appraisal or fraud action unwinding the 2026-07-21 merger, or a re-registration and relisting of the common stock. Neither has been filed or announced, and both are remote enough that the base case is a permanently closed situation. Absent that, the gradeable condition cannot resolve: **a daily close below $13.25** will not print, because there is no listed security to produce one. A reader who sees a CCRN daily bar dated after 2026-07-21 on a screen should treat it as stale vendor data and check the Form 25 before acting on it. The one thing that would genuinely change the frame — a listed successor security or a re-IPO of the Knox Lane entity — has no announced timetable.\n\n## Correlation Notes\n- **Healthcare staffing cycle:** CCRN's final public quarter (-17.8% YoY revenue, Q1-2026) is a datapoint on post-pandemic travel-nurse bill-rate and volume normalisation. With CCRN private, AMN Healthcare Services is the remaining large listed US pure-play through which that cycle is observable; this dossier asserts no figures for AMN.\n- **Small-cap take-private flow:** the completion at $13.25 (~$437M) is a filed clearing price for a sub-$500M healthcare services asset in mid-2026. It is one observation and supports no conclusion about sponsor appetite for the group.\n- **Index mechanics (inferred):** delisting removes the name from small-cap benchmarks, so any residual index-related flow would have been concentrated around the 2026-07-21 suspension rather than after it.\n- **No macro linkage remains.** A cash-settled, delisted equity has zero beta to rates, hospital utilisation or labour data. Prior correlation framing for this name is obsolete as of 2026-07-21.",
  "first_seen": "2026-05-19",
  "last_analyzed": "2026-08-16T14:42:23+00:00",
  "last_synthesized": "2026-08-16",
  "last_update_source": "watchlist_research",
  "license": "Content © FrontierPicks. Cite the canonical URL."
}