Another day, another option exchange program…- 19 June 2009

Another day, another option exchange program…

Lately,
it seems like hardly a day goes by when some other company isn’t
rolling out an option exchange program. The filings are virtually
identical with stories of woefully overpriced options damaging employee
morale. Footnoted regulars may remember that Google (GOOG) seemed to kick things off earlier this year with its option exchange program. But since then, we’ve counted dozens of others.

Today’s entry is from Cardinal Health (CAH), which has been something of a frequent flyer on footnoted. In this filing
from earlier today, they talk about giving employees the right to
exchange options that are priced higher than $56.45 a share. The filing
includes a wide range of additional material from FAQs to screenshots
of the back end, now doubt to help people like this truck driver
understand the benefits of trading in their boatloads of options for
new, lower priced ones.

A quick scan of Edgar shows that the pace of companies offering
stock option exchange programs seems to be accelerating. We counted
over 80 filings that mentioned stock option exchange programs in June
2009, compared to just 11 filings in 2008. Granted, many of those are
multiple filings

http://www.footnoted.org/buried-treasure/another-day-another-option-exchange-program/