This paper investigates the predictive ability of executives’ stock option
exercises by categorising all exercises by the overall value of the transaction.
This measure incorporates the cost to the executive of exercising the option,
together with the income generated by the associated sale of stock at the time
of exercise. As a result, we show that, in contrast to the existing literature,
executive stock option exercises do have predictive ability for future stock
returns. This is, however, limited to transactions that generate net revenue for
the executive, a finding that is the reverse of the evidence relating to standard
executive transactions
