For a good chunk of Thursday morning, Wild Oats stock was trading below $14, with one lucky buyer picking up shares at $13.25.

That was a deal as sweet as Olathe corn, since Whole Foods' buyout of the company will now go through at $18.50 per share.

We can learn a lot about the wisdom of crowds, as New Yorker writer James Surowiecki cunningly called it, by watching the performance of a company's stock after it's agreed to sell itself.

In low-risk, sure-shot deals, the stock price trades pretty close to the merger price. But the more doubters pile on, the lower it goes, and the bigger the "spread" gets between the deal price and market price.

Once upon a time, back in February, the Whole Foods-Wild Oats deal was the former, not the latter. Wild Oats stock traded at or above 98 percent of the $18.50 offer price. The market discounted any anti-trust concerns.

By May, however, the market was having other thoughts - well before the Federal Trade Commission said it would sue to block the deal. Wild Oats began to trade at around 93 percent of the offer price. By the day before the FTC's June 5 announcement, OATS closed at $16.91, just 91.4 percent of the offer price.

All this points to some pretty sharp thinking on the part of investors. For the next month, in fact, Wild Oats stock briefly recovered before sinking again. Investors had essentially priced in an FTC suit before it was announced.

That, however, was the end of the market wisdom. We now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that one big error in judgment turned into a lot of investor mistakes.

It was July 11 when Whole Foods' John Mackey admitted he spent more time blabbing on the Internet than the horniest teenager. That's not quite the way he put it, of course, but his juvenilia-style postings on the Yahoo! message board for Whole Foods investors called his judgment into question.

Many thought it called the merger into question, too. For the next 12 days, Wild Oats stock fell. By July 27, the Friday before the FTC court hearing, it closed at $14.45, just 78.1 percent of the merger price.

That period was full of valid criticism of Mackey's behavior, including a legitimate inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission as to the particulars of a public-company CEO anonymously bashing a competitor.

Some people, though, wondered what in the world Mackey's macking had to do with the legal question of whether the two natural-foods grocers should merge. But if they were placing "buy" orders for the stock, they were outnumbered. While the stock recovered slightly as the FTC hearing began in late July, it never recovered to the pre Mac-attack levels.

To be fair, a number of folks heard the presentations in court and thought the FTC had made a pretty fair case to quash the deal. That view would keep Wild Oats stock down.

But it seems the driving force behind the pessimism that continued through Thursday was the Mackey misadventure. Ultimately, investors who placed big bets that the big mouth would kill a big deal missed out on big profits.

Finance Editor David Milstead can be reached at milstead@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2648.