GOLDMAN SACHS: Traders think these 15 companies are the most likely to get taken over this year

• Wall Street is expecting merger and acquisition activity to accelerate in 2018, and there's a way to see which companies options traders think have the highest chance of being taken over.
• Goldman Sachs has singled out 15 companies whose options reflect high expectations of an acquisition.

Wall Street is expecting a major uptick in merger and acquisition (M&A) activity this year. But that information is worthless for single-stock traders unless they know which companies have the highest chance of being taken over.

That's where Goldman Sachs comes in. Katherine Fogertey and the rest of the firm's derivatives team have crunched the numbers and identified a handful of such firms. And these aren't simply qualitative recommendations - Goldman used an exact, options-based methodology designed to highlight companies for which an M&A premium is already being reflected.

The firm's approach involved calculating the 3-month/12-month term structure for a universe of companies. Goldman then ranked them by degree of downward-sloping term structure, while also ensuring the firms met a minimum liquidity threshold.

(Note: Term structure measures volatility expectations in one period relative to another. By comparing the 3-month measure to the 12-month, Goldman is assessing investor expectations around how much the stock will move in the short term, relative to longer-term volatility potential.)

The ultimate objective was to pinpoint stocks where the "options market appears better positioned for the stock to trade up sharply in the next three months, consistent with a higher potential for M&A."

Without further ado, here are the 15 stocks for which Goldman says options traders are most aggressively positioned for a takeover.