Hi again, Patrick.
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful comments.
<<How would you ask a fellow who knows this stuff where to get it on the web? >>
The simple answer to this is to ask for an URL. But you're driving at a deeper point which becomes clear later on, namely, why anyone would let you get to a data base for free. In general I would agree except that in this case I would think the data would have been readily available. Although it is clear you don't think so (and you may be right), I had thought this kind of thing would be relatively easy to get. For common data like this, you could ask the same question about why any site gives away free data- there are lots of reasons, chief among which is to give you some freebies so you'll pay for the extras. Why does Zacks, for example, give out some of the free info it does? To generate traffic to the web site. And this kind of data that I'm seeking is easy to manage in today's world (since it's already been computed, it just needs to be stored and retrieved).
I wasn't sure where you were going here:
<<The interesting thing is, the Corporate Officer who gets the options does not have a clue about what you are talking about....the stock analyst looks at it as such a small piece of the pie it's not worth the effort. >>
Perhaps if I explain why I got into this in the first place it might help. I do a lot of short selling, and I'm always looking for red flags in filings. Well, I recently read an article that gave some interesting statistics that I thought might be useful in evaluating a company that already had other red flags suggesting it might be a good short. I've excerpted a few of the highlights from the entire article which can be found here: crystalreport.com
<<Over the past several years, we have undertaken studies designed to see if there is some sort of relationship between executive pay and future shareholder returns....[A]fter some further analyses, we hit upon the idea of dividing our study group into three sub-groups....[The third group consisted of T]hose CEOs with "bad" executive compensation. CEOs in this category might be expected to earn significantly more compensation than other companies would pay for the same amount of company size and company performance. Or they might have pay packages that are hardly sensitive at all to shareholder return performance. Or they might have demonstrated definitively that they do not have a sense of fair play when it comes to taking their lumps in bad times. Or they might own hardly any of their company's shares. Or, at worst, they might exhibit everyone of these types of characteristics ...Here is what we found:
...CEOs in the "bad" category deliver lower shareholder returns than CEOs generally, and the relationship is highly statistically-significant--so much so that the probability of a chance result is only about 1-in-10,000.
....our group of "bad" companies underperformed the S&P 500 Index by 30.6 percentage points or, 3,058 basis points [for the time period under consideration- see article for details].>>
Now you may see why I, as a short seller, am interested in investigating this avenue. And it is in part precisely because most analysts don't pay sufficient attention to this aspect that I am drawn to it- they may be overlooking something important, an additional piece of the puzzle.
So in order to identify a CEO with a bad pay package, I need to work up his total compensation figures- most of the info you need is in the proxy statement filed with the SEC. There are several ways to do this, and the variance occurs due to the options pricing. Now, I won't be crushed if I can't compute this (there are sloppy shortcuts to get around this) but I would like to try. Looking at the following comment suggests that I did not make myself clear:
<<I know people, all the way up to the Chairman level, who have received stock options. I have never heard one speak about Option Vol.>> I hope what I've said now clears things up a little.
I've held back because I never wanted to assault the thread with a detailed explanation of my thinking! I was just hoping for a quick easy answer. Remember, I'm lazy. ;-)
Thanks again for all your comments and interest,
Anaxagoras |
