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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GVTucker who wrote (62974)	2/6/2003 4:23:52 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 77400

My fund manager believes that expensing options will kill hightech and I think that too. And how has this fund manager performed over the past 3 years? Was he sucked in by the Bubble? I find that a lot of people that share the stock option expensing worry are the same people that didn't worry about the absurd valuation of the market in 1999-2000. They were wrong then. And I believe they're wrong now. The issue is that there is something more than short term stock performance at play here. It is the survival of these companies and the global dominance that they enjoy now. If they can continue to grow and prosper, eventually the stock price will follow. If we do something from a business standpoint to stunt this growth, then short term some traders on SI might be happy, but we have damaged the entire growth engine of the US. It is obvious that the lure of options and growth lure the best and brightest people to the growing companies and these companies have become the backbone of the economy. I worked at one of those companies once, oracle, when everybody said we couldn't compete against IBM and we eventually took them out. I can assure you Oracle would not have become what it did without stock options. All of these points about expensing options might, might, be valid if there was universal consensus that these are real expenses. But there is not! I personally don't think there are any expenses involved here... some say there is an opportunity cost... but even that is iffy for one thing many "opportunity costs" are not expensed, geez are unused leased buildings expensed because of the "opportunity cost" of having them sit empty? Come on. This is not to mention the funky valuation problems and the pay concessions the employee takes for options, do we get to credit that as income? Anyway I do agree that options cause dilution that is clear and we should make that information readily available to investors in a clean location. That would take care of this options debate afaik those investors that are so concerned about options can just move away from tech which would be fine. The big investors, big players who understand the business agree with Chambers on options it is just the little guys and people outside the business making all this noise. Lizzie