no more stock options?

[Shortcut]

my company stopped issuing stock options to employees. i have a hard time believing every employee at the company underperformed...

what are common reasons why a company would stop issuing options?

 

[richardycc]

bankruptcy

 

[FoBoT]

they want to screw you over

 

[LSUfan]

Originally posted by: Shortcut
my company stopped issuing stock options to employees. i have a hard time believing every employee at the company underperformed...

what are common reasons why a company would stop issuing options?

They are selling the company! Run!!!









J/K There are many reasons for this. Most often it is profits are down. Good Luck

 

[Dulanic]

Had the same thing happen.

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: Shortcut
my company stopped issuing stock options to employees. i have a hard time believing every employee at the company underperformed...

what are common reasons why a company would stop issuing options?

For a privately-held company...
What incentive is given by stock options which may well never become usable? I worked for a "dot-com" that was going to go public. Stock options were a big incentive. But the market and the economy changed. Coupled with the fact that selling off parts of your company really should be a last resort, eventually the owner of the company realized that an IPO would not be a sound decision in the forseeable future, and it didn't seem likely we would be bought out, either, so the options won't get anyone much of anything. So the stock option program was replaced with a profit sharing program since the employees would actually see some benefit from it.

 

[Kadarin]

I'm working for a company that has a very good chance of either becoming public or getting bought by a major company (the latter is looking more and more likely), and I have stock options priced at $0.10/ea (with a 6month cliff on the vesting period). So I have a good chance of making a significant chunk of change, given that we are doing well. However, when I was hired, they were somewhat stingy on the actual amount of shares they were handing out.

It may be something specific to your company, but it may also have to do with corporate taxes. Not sure.

 

[Hector13]

Originally posted by: Shortcut
my company stopped issuing stock options to employees. i have a hard time believing every employee at the company underperformed...

what are common reasons why a company would stop issuing options?

stock options used to be "free" for companies in that they could be issued without the company recording an expense for them apart from their "intrinsic value" which would usually be zero anyway (an option, espcially a long-term one, with a strike price equal to the current price has a positive value, but has no intrinsic value).

While this is still technically okay under US GAAP, there has been a big push lately for companies to expense stock options using either the market value of equivalent options (if available) or some other theoretically derived value (from a model like black-scholes).

 

[Shortcut]

thanks for the feedback y'alls. looks like they discontinued stock options cause there's pressure to expense them in the future.

no replacement incentive for us, either. and they're doing secret layoffs. *sigh*...time to jump ship