(BQ) Part 2 book "Fundamentals of futures and options markets" hass contents: Employee stock options, options on stock indices and currencies, futures options, binomial trees in practice, interest rate options, credit derivatives,.and other contents. | Find more at 14 C H A P T E R Employee Stock Options Employee stock options are call options on a company’s stock granted by the company to its employees. The options give the employees a stake in the fortunes of the company. If the company does well so that the company’s stock price moves above the strike price, employees gain by exercising the options and then selling at the market price the stock they buy at the strike price. Employee stock options have become very popular in the last 20 years. Many companies, particularly technology companies, feel that the only way they can attract and keep the best employees is to offer them very attractive stock option packages. Some companies grant options only to senior management; others grant them to people at all levels in the organization. Microsoft was one of the first companies to use employee stock options. All Microsoft employees were granted options and, as the company’s stock price rose, it is estimated that over 10,000 of them became millionaires. In 2003, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue the use of options and award shares of Microsoft to employees instead. But many other companies throughout the world continue to be enthusiastic users of employee stock options. Employee stock options are popular with start-up companies. Often these companies do not have the resources to pay key employees as much as they could earn with an established company and they solve this problem by supplementing the salaries of the employees with stock options. If the company does well and shares are sold to the public in an IPO, the options are likely to prove to be very valuable. Some newly formed companies have even granted options to students who worked for just a few months during their summer break—and in some cases this has led to windfalls of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the students! This chapter explains how stock option plans work and how their popularity has been influenced by their
