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Strategies & Market Trends : Tech Stock Options -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Anaxagoras who wrote (58405)	3/26/1999 1:10:00 AM
From: Patrick Slevin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58727

Hmm. First of all, I do not think you are tying up this thread. Although once vibrant and busy it has fallen somewhat in favor of other threads. I myself only posted here for the first time the other day because I was looking for an old post. I agree, the data may be readily available somewhere. I just would not get my hopes up. On the second issue, I glanced at that report. It was too long to read carefully, I'm sorry to say. Let me say this though. 5 or 6 years ago I owned several thousand PSE&G. I don't know what the symbol is. Public Service Electric and Gas. One of the Directors uses the same barber, Josh Weston, he was the chairman of Automatic Data. I always wanted to ask that guy, if I ever saw him in the barber shop, just why he and the guy who runs AIRCO were the only two outside board members of PSE&G who owned more stock than I did. What kind of vested interest did the others have? I finally dumped the stock. But the stock is a utility. When they did their survey, could it be that the go-go NASD stocks were more more prone to compensate with stock than were the more staid companies that paid their Senior Management primarily in cash? If this were 7 or 8 years ago and you were an up and coming Tech Wunderkind and I was Mike Dell but had little money so I offered you Stock but the head of IBM offered you cash which would be the more logical play? In hindsight of course it's Dell. But at the time would you have given Dell a second glance? Now this may not sound like a valid argument but if the survey was performed 7 years ago Dell probably would not have been in the survey. If it's there now it's probably because it "fits" well. If there are three more "DELL"'s out there now but only one makes it then the other two won't make the next survey. Meanwhile, the "underpaying" companies are the old Blue Chips I would think, with a different corporate culture entirely. I think, without looking closely at the argument, that their data may be corrupted. Take my example of PSE&G. What utility compensates in options? Then, what utility outperforms the S&P? So if you give me data that has 20% of the companies skimping on stock options but 20% of those are slow growing (such as utilities) then the data is skewed to start with. By the way, if I recall correctly, the salary of the Chair/CEO/President is determined by the outside directors....the Compensation Committee. So perhaps you are right in that sense. If the person in charge had any vision or guts s/he would not accept a contract without a fair amount of stock options. If s/he did not fight for it, then perhaps the person does not think much of the company's prospects to start with. But to go back to the PSE&G example I agree with you in this....if the Board of Directors and Senior Management don't accumulate stock then I wish to have nothing to do with that company. Too complacent. Good luck in your search.