Friday, June 09, 2006

Cyberonics Questioned On Stock Options

Questions Raised on Another Chief's Stock Options - New York Times

My wife heard a brief mention about some questionable stock options given to executives of Cyberonics this morning on CNN. I did not get to hear it, so I searched this morning for the news on CNN.COM. Never found it. I did further research and found it at the New York Times.

After reading the article, it turns out that the whole report by this guy Amit Hazan, is completely misleading. He cites "instant paper profits of 2.3 million" for the CEO. This is insane and simply untrue. The executives have not even exercised their options that they received in 2004. Exercised at current price, the options are worth worth 600k for the CEO and the other executives options are worth 40k.

It was simply poor judgement for any of the news outlets to even report on this document by Hazan before checking facts. The stock ended up dropping by 16 percent, then regaining nearly all it's value back. But some people lost a lot of money due to an over-zealous analyst and sloppy reporting.

No comments: