Holy crap! My stock options got repriced
One of my coworkers was looking at his 401(k) statement online when he clicked on the ‘Long Term Incentive’ tab that shows our stock options. Our out of the money options. The surprise - no, shock - came when he realized they’d been repriced! Apparently, unknown to us drones, the company had revised the strike price down for these options we all got a few years ago.
The company had done something that benefited employees and didn’t advertise it in the daily bombardment of corporate propaganda email. How many times does that happen? Like never. Not only that, but for some reason, the total number of options was slightly higher than it used to be (by around 5%).
What to make of this? My cynical side says there are two possible reasons. One, it’s a mistake that will be corrected by tomorrow. Two, it’s for real and in the unlikely event it benefits us workers, it will benefit management 100-fold.
May 17th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Sounds fishy to me too. What company do you work for? Let us know so we can avoid investing there. =)
May 17th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I’d be surprised if a company were able to reprice options without raising any eyebrows.
My employer dealt with underwater options several years ago by giving us a ’special grant’. We still have our old underwater options with strike prices anywhere from $40 - $70, and the new grant was priced at about $25.
The size of the grant was calculated based on the number of older underwater options we had.
Of course that special grant is now under water too
May 17th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
May 17th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
no way those options can be repriced, period. Unless those are the new options…
May 18th, 2007 at 2:22 am
Get to see your blog in DebtCC blog Hut and astonished while reading this post.Please tell me for which company you are working for?