Stock Options
The phenomenon of Stock Options has had a dramatic rise and fall during the last 15 years or so. They have been hailed as a great way to share ownership, attract and retain employees in a tight labor market and "the fuel of entrepreneurial fire" (Malone, 2003). At the same time, they have been condemned as a major cause of the high-profile business scandals during 2000-01 and the subsequent down-turn in the U.S. stock-markets. In this paper, I shall describe what Stock Options really are, take a look at their history, advantages, and disadvantages and discuss their future in the business world.
What are Stock Options?
A stock option is a contract offered by the employer that gives an employee the right to buy or sell a certain number of shares in the company at a specific price within a certain period of time. The price at which the option is provided is called the "grant" or "strike" price and is usually the market price at the time the options are granted. The employee, having the stock option, is free to exercise his option at his/her option and the buying and selling of the stock is not binding. ("Employee Stock Option fact Sheet," NCEO Website)
As an example, a company may give an employee the option of buying a specific number of shares at the current market price of the share (say $10) on a specific date. The stock option contract would have a "vesting period" (say, one year) after which the employee has the option of selling the stock at the current market price. If the market price of the share has risen to say $15 after the vesting period, the...
Stock Options Payment of stratospheric compensations to the corporate executives by the dot.com companies is the talk of the day. It is pertinent to note that these compensations are paid not only in terms of the cash compensations but also in terms of stock options. However, compensations plans in terms of stock options are not new and being used years together in order to attract the employees and retain with a
In these scenarios, stock options provide a powerful tool in which to properly align the goals of management with those of the firm What exactly performance-oriented rewards are in regards stock options? To begin, options are not stock in its physical form but rather a claim to stock at a predetermined price. There are two key distinctions regarding this concept. First, stock options have an asymmetric payoff (see Chapter 2)
.....company would expense the 1000 share options at $15 (1000 x $15 = $15,000), as this was fair market value at the time of expense, based on Black-Scholes (Harper, 2017). In 2014, the expense would be $3 per share option (1000 x $3 = $3,000), because that is the amount of increase in the value of the options that derives from the change in the exercise price. The accounting for the
Executive Stock Option Plans "If the company does not do better than its competitors, but the stock market goes up, executives do very well from their stock options. This makes no sense." Discuss viewpoint. Can you think of alternatives to the usual executive option plan that take the viewpoint into account? Executive stock options are performance-based incentive plans that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. They declined due to the stock
employee stock option pricing is effected by the bonus plan hypotheses as discussed in the Watts and Zimmerman article. Employee stock option pricing is an option on the common stock of a company that is issued as a form of non-cash compensation. Restrictions on the option (as for instance vesting and limited transferability) are ways in which the business attempts to align its own interests with those of the holder's
Since institutional investors typically hedge their risks by using asset liability management and derivatives instruments against market risk, it is estimated that institutional investors in a representative stock market such as the London Stock Exchange lost only 10% of the value of their assets in the 1987 crash. In the absence of such hedging the effect of the crash and the resultant liquidity crunch would have been far greater.
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