Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.
RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.
In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for - unless you are high enough up in the company that you see the real books, or you have so much invested they have to show you as a large shareholder. (nobody is the later - large shareholders have a full time job managing their money not working for someone else). There have been a number of cases where a company has unexpectedly filed bankruptcy and someone lost their job and their savings on the same day.
I'd question this conventional wisdom, simply because you have a lot more information about the company as an employee than a random investor does, even if you are not in possession of things like financials that the SEC considers "material non-public information". Things like culture, intelligence of your coworkers, whether or not you're actually delivering on your commitments, how many feature requests and bug reports you get from your customers, mood of management, perks offered, etc. are all intangibles, but they are usually better predictors of long-term company performance than the financials that the company gives investors.
If your company is not doing well enough or is not something that you would consider investing in, you should find a different company to work for. Bad things are going to happen in your future, regardless of whether you own shares or not.
Amazon for instance has over 1 million employees. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured
Huh? We're not talking about the custodial staff.
> Amazon for instance has over 1 million customers. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured
This is a hilarious example; especially at Amazon, "rank and file" employees are privy to $100M+ AWS deals, they have to implement them after all.
I assure you the random developer on the EC2 service team for instance knew nothing about the sales deals.
Also a “$100 million dollar sales deal” is nothingburger for AWS not enough to move the market.
Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?
Hmm, no?
As a solutions architect at Amazon I was very much a "rank and file" employee, and privy to large deals, so I'm not sure what you're on about. I haven't heard of Professional Services, presumably you guys had different responsibilities.
https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/
But either way, it’s monumentally a kind of weird statement to think that anyone besides “janitors” would know anything about the deals that would go through or to think a “$100 million sales deal” would move the needle especially as we see right now that AMZN is tanking because they reported they will spend more than all of their free cash flow on CAPEX for AI. You couldn’t have predicted that
Not sure I understand the value proposition here, but then again Amazon is known for having redundant teams every now and again.
They know the clients, the contracts, hiring, cost cutting way before the general public does. The problem is that many BigTech is sum of many units which might not be correlated, but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from.
Again, I worked at AWS and we had no insider knowledge
But if anyone is connected to few friends across team, they would know they are hiring for China sales team(or dependent team like internal tooling for sales etc.) aggressively or firing them.
> information that can move markets.
That's the hardest part to figure out. Stocks aren't very correlated with anything. Slight changes in this quarter's iPhone sales in China doesn't move the share price very much if it is within range of expectation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622584
I have worked at Amazon. I can guarantee you that no one on the Amazon Retail side had any clue what went on at AWS or vice versa.
Do you think that any of the rank and file knew that Jassy was going to announce mass layoffs or that Amazon was going to spend so much on Capex for AI that the stock would go down?
Isn't Apple pretty famously secretive even internally around stuff like product launches? I would expect a company that runs a tight ship to have rank-and-file employees who would have less potentially actionable info than ones at companies that don't control information as well.
After about third earnings call (which happened a tiny bit before the trading window for our stock grants opened), I (re)learned the hard lesson that even if we delivered and I had actual, material, move the needle impact on corporate financials, that would not translate in any way to stock price. Except maybe if I pushed it really, really, down by causing an avalanche of problems that resulted in some big name deal going down.
The stock prices are vibe based, once its publicly traded your share value will be based on whatever vibes pushed numbers in excel around earnings call, and it's perfectly normal occurrence to beat expected earnings per share for 3 quarters straight and every quarter get a different vibed-off reason as to why the price should go down.
Every time I got an RSU I could just sign into my RSU account and press a single button which sold them all, put a portion of the proceeds aside for taxes, and deposited the rest as cash directly into my bank account within 1-2 business days.
How are options more liquid than that?