It’s fair to say that we timed our purchase of Rentokil better than its sale. We tipped its shares at 293.3p in September 2017 and had we held on until now, with the shares at 512.6p, we would have banked a profit of almost 75pc. Unfortunately we contented ourselves with a gain of just 20pc by selling in February 2019.

A month ago the shares were even higher, at 635.4p, but they have taken quite a battering since then. The reason? The company announced the acquisition of a rival firm for many billions of pounds and, as shareholders in Unilever have seen in recent days, investors don’t always react well to such plans.

In Questor’s view, the market is generally right to be sceptical. The bigger the takeover, the more scope there is for it to go wrong, and Rentokil’s planned takeover of Terminix is certainly big: it is paying $6.7bn, about £5bn at the current exchange rate, slightly more than half of Rentokil’s own market value of £9.5bn.

If Rentokil is in fact overpaying, at least it will be doing so largely in its own shares rather than in cash. This avoids too heavy an impact on its balance sheet but also offers the consolation that its own shares rose very strongly in the months before the deal was announced, so if Rentokil is overvaluing Terminix it is at least paying for it in an overvalued currency.

Or to put it another way, to meet the purchase price in dollars Rentokil needs to create fewer new shares, and hence dilute existing shareholders less, than if it had done the deal when its share price was lower.