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Best Books of 2014
Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for 2014's Best Books of the Year in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more.
The fast and easy way(TM) to master IPOs, ISOs, ESPPs, and more! Confused by the huff and puff surrounding stock options? Let expert Alan Simon demystify this often-confusing world for you. From clear explanations of how your stock options might make you money - or not - this unintimidating guide will help you navigate your company's stock option plan with ease.
Discover how to:
Understand different types of stock options
Read and find traps in your stock option agreement
Evaluate the pros and cons of company investment vehicles Assess vesting schedules and tax laws
Tap Web resources
The Dummies Way
Explanations in plain English
"Get in, get out" information
Icons and other navigational aids
Tear-out cheat sheet
Top ten lists
A dash of humor and fun
Get smart! www.dummies.com Sign up for daily eTips at www.dummiesdaily.com Choose from among 33 different subject categories Get news you can use on everything from money to health to computers
About the Author
Alan R. Simon, author of Data Warehousing For Dummies, is a manager at Deloitte Consulting. Alan has experienced every side of stock options in public and pre-IPO companies, large Fortune 500 corporations, and small consulting firms.
First, disregard the 5-star rating. *I* think the book is good of course, but that's not why I'm writing this comment.
To the two recent reviewers who complain that the book isn't about puts and calls but rather about ISOs, NQSOs, etc. - look, I'm sorry for your inconvenience but if you had taken about 2 minutes to skim the table of contents and the editorial review on the amazon.com page ("...your company's stock option plan..."), you would CLEARLY see what type of stock options this book discusses. In fact, taking less time to do so than it took you to write your complaint-reviews and give the book a poor review would have saved each of you $20 or whatever the book cost you.
So my sympathies to you for your misspent $, but come on: blaming the author and publisher for your own haste and, further, feeling the need to do so publicly on an amazon.com review with one- and two-star rankings? (At least the other reader who did the same thing back in August, 2003 had the courtesy to give a 5-star ranking because of the reselling experience on amazon.com to rectify his/her error.)
I sincerely hope that if you do begin to dabble in puts and calls - the other kind of stock options - that you do so with much greater care than you took in making your respective book purchases. Otherwise, you should really think twice about that side of the investing world.
To the one reader who is looking for a beginner's book about the other kind of stock options: see "Futures and Options For Dummies" by Joe Duarte. But do your homework first before buying!
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
By far, the best, most thorough, and most honest book on stock options I've ever read. Even though other books (such as Pastore and Thomas) cover taxes on stock options in more detail, the author definitely provides more than enough information, including considerations I've never seen elsewhere - ordinary income tax and AMT implications of working in multiple states, for example. And he covers the dreaded AMT trap of ISOs with detailed scenarios, better and easier to understand than I've seen anywhere else. But by far, this book's greatest value is in the author's no-holds-barred discussion of - as he puts it in one of the chapter headings - the good, the bad, and the ugly of stock options, including an entire chapter on stock option agreements and what to watch for. Like most Dummies books, there is humor and sarcasm, but the author doesn't overdo it; it just makes the book extremely readable. Even those who have had stock options in the past - whether or not they made money or not - will find value in the author's fresh perspective and post-crash look at just about everything about options.
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63 of 79 people found the following review helpful
I was looking for a "dummies" book on options trading (puts, calls, volatility, etc.) so I ordered it. What I got was a comprehensive review of the ramifications of owning stock options issued by the company that employs you. In short, I felt like a dummy for not researching further before purchase. Don't make the same mistake I did. There is a silver lining, though. I promptly repackaged the book in the shipping box that I received it in and sold it through Amazon, recouping almost all of my original cost. If you have any books you don't need or want, I wholeheartedly endorse Amazon's used book marketplace. I gave it 5 stars because of this experience, and the fact that it is another top-notch example from the excellent Dummies series, just not what I was looking for. Incidentally, if you're looking for what I was looking for originally, you can't go wrong with anything Larry McMillan has written.
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This is a good intro for ISOs, NQSO's, taxation issues, and subjects related more to employee stock options. If you're looking for a book on how to hedge or speculate using options there are better books out there for that. My own view is that since options are a time wasting asset and aren't usually held very long you should get some background in technical analysis too since in the short run the stock market--especially these days--tends to be ruled by fickle market sentiments rather than fundamentals and by the now over 5000 hedge funds out there, most of which aren't headquartered in the U.S. so aren't subject to U.S. rules on mutual funds. Most mutual funds can't have more than 2% of their capital in any one position and many can't short stocks. Hedge funds have no such limitations. The argument for hedge funds is that since their (theoretically, anyway) strategy is to be market neutral at any one time, they are a good thing since they act to "stabilize" the market and move it toward equilibrium.
Of course this is just another academic theory that any experienced trader knows is pure nonsense. Don't get me wrong, I've studied a fair bit of academic economics and it's important to know some, but the reality is that the hedge funds all tend to have the same momentum mentality so they all pile into and out of the same stocks all at once, which defeats the original rationale for their existence. The other thing that didn't help was the removal during the Bush administration of the uptick short selling rule, another bad idea since anyone with any real world stock experience knows that stocks tend to crash downwards, not upwards.Read more ›
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