Company executives enjoy many additional benefits over rank and file workers. For beginners, it may be surprising to know the amount of stock compensation they hold. Are you interested in the number of shares managed by the CEO of a particular company or other senior management? You can easily find it. How to determine the amount of shares held by a public company officer. Go to the NASDAQ website and enter the brand symbol of the company you are interested in. Click Flash Quotes. Use the drop-down box to select Insider Form 4. Search the list until you find an executive for the company you are interested in. Click on that name. Move to the top of the list. This should be the latest date. Move your line of sight to the rightmost column titled Holdings. This is the number of shares currently owned and managed by this officer. Multiply that number by the final price of the company's stock to get a dollar figure. Of course, this number changes from day to day. You will be amazed at how many this number is. Please note that these are only the officer's current shareholdings. I don't know how many shares he has sold in the past. It also does not show the number of shares the company will grant to him or her in the future. When you start looking at these numbers, you may find something amazing. If you are currently the CEO or executive officer of the company, the numbers will not shock you because you are already familiar with them. However, if you are currently an employee of a listed company, you may be wondering about the discrepancy between salary and executive equity holdings. "But CEOs and other executives worked hard for their money," some say. And that may be true. But did they really work harder than you every day? If so, does the more difficult work they spend help explain the gap between the average worker's wages and executive equity holdings? Maybe the answer is no. This leads to some interesting insights into how our economy works. It is said that the era of serfdom is over, is that true? We now have an economic feudal system. The monarch-owned real estate and compliments have been replaced by stock awards for company directors and owners. But serfs and workers do the job. The monarch and his court are still rewarding. Private companies may not be able to find information about public companies on the NASDAQ website. I like that the SEC, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, requires this information to be made publicly available. Of course, it should be available to potential investors. But if you own a stake in a company through a 401K plan, you are an investor. In addition to the NASDAQ website, this information is also available on the Securities and Exchange Commission website. In fact, there is a wealth of information to discover. Finding them on the NASDAQ website is often even easier. If you know the value of the shares held by company executives, you may not be ashamed to ask for that salary increase you were thinking of. Knowledge is often synonymous with power.
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