If you haven’t already noticed, we wanted to make you aware of several recent enhancements to StockOpter.com. These upgrades were designed to increase your productivity and help you to provide better stock compensation diversification guidance. Here’s a brief summary of the enhancements and some related resources and information.
Share Diversification Analysis: We have developed a methodology for reducing the risk of concentrated company stock positions by helping clients to establish an annual diversification strategy their vesting restricted/performance shares. This new “Share Diversification” analysis assists advisors and clients to interactively visualize the multi-year projected values of their company stock compared to a diversified portfolio at different rates of diversification. Using the interactive “Diversification” dashboard you can quickly illustrate different scenarios and the analytics are included in our updated client deliverables. For additional information on using and explaining the Share Diversification Analysis, refer to the following articles:
- Facilitating Owned and Restricted Share Diversification Decisions
- Understanding the StockOpter Share Diversification Analysis
User Interface (UI): Changes to the StockOpter.com UI have made it much more “participant centric.” Although the previous functions are all still accessible from the top menus, now when you add or select a participant you can access all of their information (e.g. report creation, archives, dashboards, monitoring alerts, etc.) from the tabs on the left side of their participant information. You no longer have to reselect the participant to use other functionality. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
New Report Templates: In order to incorporate the new Share Diversification Analysis in your reports we updated the 3 main templates (i.e. Options & Restricted/Performance, Options ONLY and Restricted/Performance ONLY). We also updated the Sample Report Presentation Guide and added an “Abbreviated” template that can be used for periodic updates. Using the “Manage Templates” function under the “Reports” menu (Level 5 Users Only), these templates can be downloaded and modified to include your company logo and disclosures and uploaded as “New” templates. The StockOpter branded templates can then be deactivated. Refer to the HELP information on that page for instructions or let us know if you need some guidance.
Modeling Post Employment Scenarios: Although you can modify grant expiration and vesting dates/shares in StockOpter.com to model situations such as retirement, severance, termination and change of control, it is a tedious process to edit the grant data to switch between scenarios. A workaround for this that uses an additional ticker is explained in the FAQ: Modeling Different Expiration and Vesting Scenarios.
Ideas for getting the most from StockOpter: Financial advisors who currently use StockOpter.com to generate revenue by attracting corporate executives and helping them to diversify their company stock and options can do five simple things to drive additional business as described in the article: Ways of Generating More Business from Corporate Executives.
Workshops: Marketing, template modification and best practices webinars are available to all StockOpter.com customers at no charge. Simply email me indicating your area of interest and availability. I’ll then reach out to schedule a day/time for a custom workshop for you and your team. These sessions have proven to be a highly productive means of helping our customers to get more out of their StockOpter.com subscriptions.
We hope this information and the recent enhancements are helpful. Keep in mind that the majority of the enhancements to StockOpter.com are based on user feedback, so do not hesitate to reach out with your ideas or questions.
Bill Dillhoefer