I am happy to see that I am not the only one that is displeased at the way OPL was handled. As I have said before, there is more than enough blame to spread around to officers (present & past) of the company.
hitthebigone: You bring up some valid points and some interesting questions; ones that many of us have been asking for a long time and never got answers to.
tieguy: I spent many years in management and like the yearly UPS stock incentive; the OPL stock became a part of your compensation. I was there when it started at 25 a share and was awarded those shares. In my opinion, those shares were EARNED, not GIVEN.
Unless I am mistaken, the first shares were awarded in 1984. It would be interesting to see where an investment made at that time, in a conservative company, would be right now. Also, dont forget, 25 is where the shares started; they went up from there. So, if you consider that you MAY get $10.00 a share; in 1991 the shares were $5.41 a share, your investment would not even have doubled in a time when (I am speaking now of the boom in stock prices in general) most stock prices were going through the roof.
I dont know about you, but when I make an investment I want it to grow. When that doesnt happen over a reasonable amount of time that I have already predetermined, I make a change. With OPL, we were limited to how much and when we could make that change.
ups vette; In defense of hitthebigone we were all looking at a company that we thought was on the way to being a great investment (based on what we were told and the way the stock price was steadily going up) I personally did not buy any ANR stock, but I can understand how others that were in a position to be able to buy it would have thought that it would be a good investment.