{"id":264081,"date":"2010-02-02T07:55:43","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T12:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/felix-salmon\/2010\/02\/02\/turning-stock-bonuses-into-cash\/"},"modified":"2010-02-02T07:55:43","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T12:55:43","slug":"turning-stock-bonuses-into-cash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/264081","title":{"rendered":"Turning stock bonuses into cash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It probably comes as no surprise to learn that bankers have discovered a loophole allowing them to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.efinancialnews.com\/assetmanagement\/pensionfunds\/content\/1056429747\">turn their restricted stock into cash<\/a>. The trick is to notice that <i>restricted<\/i> stock can still be <i>vested<\/i> stock &#8212; which means that although it can&#8217;t be sold, it is owned by the employee in question and can therefore be pledged as collateral against some kind of equity derivative.<\/p>\n<p>Liam Vaughan&#8217;s article is vague on the specifics, talking only about &#8220;strategies such as call options, put options, and collars&#8221; which allow bankers to cash out at &#8220;a discount of up to 50%&#8221;; I&#8217;d be interested to know exactly how this works. The obvious thing to do is just sell the stock forward on the date it stops being restricted, but maybe that&#8217;s not allowed or there&#8217;s a smarter way to do the same thing using options.<\/p>\n<p>Does anybody have any details on what&#8217;s going on here, and how widespread this practice is? And does this tactic defeat the purpose of paying bankers in stock, or is the 50% discount punishment enough?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It probably comes as no surprise to learn that bankers have discovered a loophole allowing them to turn their restricted stock into cash. The trick is to notice that restricted stock can still be vested stock &#8212; which means that although it can&#8217;t be sold, it is owned by the employee in question and can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":398,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}