Equity Compensation Advisor News: August

This monthly news brief contains ideas and information to help financial advisors grow their practices by engaging individuals with equity compensation (i.e. employee stock options, restricted shares, etc.) and providing them with profitable guidance.

• The Myths and Truths of Equity Compensation:  Employee stock options and grants of company stock can be very confusing for recipients regardless of the lengths companies go to provide education on these programs. Consequently, misconceptions materialize and are held as facts propagated by water cooler discussions. This article contains the major misconceptions concerning equity compensations and the associated truths.
• A New Look at the Leverage in Employee Stock Options:  The leverage inherent in employee stock options has always been addressed in StockOpter.com, but there is a new table that now provides additional insight. This blog posting explains how it can be used to help stock option recipients to better understand the leverage effect and to make informed decisions.
• Potential Tax Increases in 2013 Signal Need to Review Equity Compensation Holdings:  Nobody knows exactly what will happen to tax rates next year, but it is a good idea to run a StockOpter analysis and have a discussion with your clients before the end of this year. Grants with low Insight Ratios and concentrated owned share positions are good candidates for diversification this year. Be aware that any of the potential tax increases will require a corresponding increase in stock price to break even.
• Stay on top of Equity Compensation and Employee Stock Option News:  An easy way to keep abreast of these topics is to set up Google Alerts for “Employee Stock Options” and “Equity Compensation”. This function scans the internet and emails you a list of matches based on selected criteria (i.e. type of results, frequency and volume). It’s very handy.
• Practice Building Resources:  The StockOpter University contains a wide variety of article focused on helping advisors to secure new clients and assets under management. A couple of the recent ones include: Reasons Clients Don’t Refer and Ideas for Attracting Executives.  StockOpter.com is an equity compensation management platform that creates customized reports, performs “what-ifs” and monitors decision triggers.  A free demo is available.