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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Qualified Opinion who wrote (17751)	1/6/2003 6:11:33 PM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 19079

I guess these guys lost my telephone number, because he didn't check in with me, either. I didn't see anything about the option price, so I can't even try to look up dates. In all the time that I've been following ORCL, all of the big option sales that I've seen have fit into one of 3 categories. Either the market is crazy and they are unloading during the bubble, or they got fired or quit and had to sell, or the options were getting close to expiration. I've seen smaller sales that were reputed to be "buying a house and needs some money". What I haven't seen happen at ORCL was "routinely getting rid of stock as fast as they could get away with it" (which did happen at Informix, for instance). I don't disagree that options have been abused at lots of companies, but I read the ORCL statements and except for the "please stay another 4 years" grant to Ellison, I've never seen grants that seemed absurdly high to me. I don't think that Henley or Ellison selling stock after 8 or 9 years and making a lot of money at it is an example of abusing options. (I only wish that I had gone to ORCL in 1991 when a friend of mine did. He lives in a big house in the best neighborhood in Palo Alto -- across the street from Steve Jobs -- and I don't think that ORCL stockholders have any cause to be upset about that, either.)