Nickname: Chowder

Review: Any way you look at it the facts are that these options made money 100% of the time -- that is how these companies got caught. These professors looked at that and said, what are the chances of that. Now as an investor I would love to have that record. I'd make Warren Buffet look stupid. So the question is was it fair for companies to ask you to invest in their companies and risk your money while they cheated in the same process, and also how does this affect investors?

Date reviewed: Jun 12, 2007 6:42 PM

Nickname: moretrick

Review: If the backdating of options show you the CEOs are too greedy to care about being caught, how about announcing all bad news before the set option date? How many CEOs did this way -- quite a lot.

Date reviewed: May 31, 2006 12:16 AM

Nickname: Silicon Valley worker

Review: Stop and consider the consequences of misleading people about the facts. I am just a lowly worker bee hoping to use my stock options to pay for college and such for my family. Now our company and tax accountants tell me that I could have to pay taxes not on what I can sell the options for but on what some fortuneteller in Congress thinks it might be worth some day. The grants are under water but due to hysteria I am being told to cancel or pay huge taxes on money I never have yet received. And at the rate the stock is going, never will. Thanks for killing the American dream for the guys working 70 hours a week. It's not fair to tax people on money they did not receive.

Date reviewed: May 30, 2006 4:08 PM

Nickname: bull

Review: Obviously the researcher, or the Merril Lynch analyst or the reporter of this article knows how stock option awards work. A stock option award when awarded does not vest that very moment but vests over a period of 48 or 60 months and the initial vesting usually has a waiting period (typically 12 months). So an option going up after 20 days or 40 days after the award does not result in any material benefit and does not matter. If people do not understand how something works they should try to find out how it does work before reporting something totally false and create a perception that some cheating is being done while in reality they (the reporter, analyst and the researcher) do not understand what it is they are reporting on.

Date reviewed: May 26, 2006 12:43 AM

Nickname: ShortBuster

Review: Timing of the back-dated options development very interesting. 10-1 Hedge fund shorts been planning to spring this on the market for a while. As usual, using the stupid media.

Date reviewed: May 25, 2006 11:16 PM

Nickname: Cynthia

Review: I count 42 companies mentioned in the media to date. Some 25 first appeared in the past week based on assertions from an accounting research group no one has heard of, a semi analyst who thinks 1/3 of his universe are crooks, the Wall Street Journal, which has yet to explain its criteria for naming these companies, and a couple of others with even less credibility. The result is that 14 of the 25 have already either received notice from Federal authorities, have hired lawyers to investigate themselves, or have been sued. This is out of control and if this kind of accusing is allowed to continue, we will have a lot of poor investors and rich lawyers.

Date reviewed: May 25, 2006 2:36 AM

Nickname: Greedy

Review: How much is enough? Executives of public companies have compensation in the millions, and they need to manipulate options to take more from the stockholders? I find it hard to understand this extreme greed.

Date reviewed: May 24, 2006 6:19 PM

Nickname: jim

Review: I want an investigation of the writers involved in these articles. The first to find a connection between articles written and big money used to profit off the scandals proposed by the articles... gets a prize. We need to police the financial and political news reporting in this country. The facts ma'am... just the facts.

Date reviewed: May 24, 2006 3:17 PM

Nickname: Juniper

Review: What does a stock option date at a 40 day low have to do with anything? What counts is the difference between the stock price of the option on the date granted and the magnitude of the increase in the stock price in a predefined interval (e.g. 10 days, one month) after the offering. If the price goes up 0.1% or 10% a share, the latter indicates options backdating. However, the 6 detailed examples the press is latched onto (Wall Street Journal: "The Perfect Payday") are glaring examples of potential backdating of options. I have personally gone through the SEC form 4 and 14-A filings and most of the generalized, non-specific assertions at 20 additional companies by the research houses (e.g. CFRA) and the brokerage firms (e.g. Hyman/S&P, Gelblum/JP Morgan Chase) is a bunch of bunk! They are the ones that need to be investigated (with large short positions on wrongfully suspected companies).

Date reviewed: May 24, 2006 3:00 PM

Nickname: Brian

Review: If I cannot backdate my trades, why do these execs think it is perfectly fine to backdate their options? Shareholders need to step up and clear the companies of these people.

Date reviewed: May 24, 2006 2:33 PM