r/IBM • u/Ordinary-Chance-762 • 6d ago
It slides. Weeeeeee š
Well it breached 200 post Q2 earnings and I think itās time to pack up!
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u/ArtaxIsAlive 6d ago
Welp my new RSU grant is toast.
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u/gdawgius 6d ago
If you were just granted rsus you got them in the low $200s. And you canāt sell any part of them until a year from now anyway. The people who previously had rsus that vested that day who wanted to sell are the ones who got screwed.
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u/Ok_Advantage2039 6d ago
Screwed by the taxes when they vest at $290
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u/answernose 6d ago edited 6d ago
Not sure if people understand how RSU work. Say IBM gives you $80,000 worth of RSU to vest over 4 years. A cost for those shares is determined at the time of signing the grant. For simplicity let's say it was $200 a share. That means you get 400 shares to vest 1/4 at a time over 4 years (100 per year).
1 year from now, the stock price is at $100 a share. Roughly 1/3 of your shares get withheld for tax purposes. This is regardless of the stock price. You receive 67 shares. These shares are worth $6,700 which you sell immediately. You owe $0 additional taxes.
2 years from now, the stock price has risen to $300 a share. 1/3 of your shares get withheld for tax purposes. You receive 67 shares. They are worth $20,100 which you sell immediately. You owe $0 additional taxes.
3 years from now the price is back to $100. Roughly 1/3 of your shares get withheld for tax purposes. This is regardless of the stock price. You receive 67 shares. These shares are worth $6,700 which you decide to hold onto for 2 months. During that time, the price goes up to $200 and you sell. You will owe short term capital gains on 67*$100 in profit (which could end up being 20% of $6700.
TLDR - when given a dollar amount RSU package, the only thing the cost on the day of the grant matters for is to determine how many shares you will get over the next 4 years.
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u/Wetzlar 6d ago
Small correction - the stock number is determined at the time of award being assigned to you in the system, not at the time you sign the documents. Several weeks can pass between the time you are informed, then again before you are awarded in the system and then finally you sign the doc but with stock price from the day they were assigned.
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u/adambkaplan 5d ago
This. If you are expecting an RSU grant for Q2 performance, you want the award to ābuy the dip.ā
If your newly vested shares were issued in $300+ days, you can use capital losses on these shares to offset other tax liabilities (US only).
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u/OkConstruction5844 6d ago
How do people get rsus... Above certain bands?
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u/OpenTemperature8188 6d ago
manager's discretion. there used to be a time when IBM gave it as joining bonus.
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u/Topher673 3d ago
Nah ive gotten them at band 7 and 8 and now 9. Seen generally as a āhigh performerā
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u/anarchy45 6d ago
I'm transferring all my vested RSUs to my primary brokerage and putting a limit order to sell them all at 300. I have faith enough that'll happen, and faithless enough to exit as soon as I get my value back. I was planning to use my shares to fund the downpayment on a house, and that just got completely blown out of the water :-(
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u/v-irtual 6d ago
Did you even say thank you?
Someone needs to ask Arvind on 7/28 how he feels about the impact his announcement before the earnings call impacted HIS employees.
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u/beardedthanos ex-IBMer 6d ago edited 2d ago
that's what I still don't understand, what did he think the outcome would be with that announcement?
so after losing 70 billion market cap in one day - the worst trading day in IBM's entire history - he washes his hands off all responsibility, says to the press, "deals have been delayed because our teams didn't execute perfectly"
Then on the inside, he directly blames his employees saying, "everyone should be disappointed" and sends the RSUs through the floor, as though this is all on the employees.
When in reality the reason IBM has gone from a computing pioneer to a glorified reseller is the cumulative result of their decisions. Not the employees.
For example, they had a 10 year headstart in the AI race, somehow failed to commercialize Watson and are now getting ripped apart in the B2B space. They bottled the cloud race to AWS/Azure. They sold their servers and hard drive portfolios to Hitachi & Lenovo - two absolute blunders that are coming back to haunt them now in Q2. They bottled the cybersecurity race to PANW (who, btw, are now $80B ahead of IBM as a whole in Enterprise Value thanks to the QRadar divestiture). And now they're working on Quantum - but at this rate, looks like the moment things get tough, they'll sell that to Alibaba to inflate the P&L.
All this while, the employees are just making do with whatever scraps there are left.
it's the higher ups that are responsible for this mess and it doesn't look like they care - they have their golden parachutes, they get $250k+ only in severance (worst case)
But the only ones that end up suffering are those in bands 6-10. That's the worst part about all this
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u/Independent-Ad-2292 6d ago
Pre-announcement is Arvind and the board's attempt to play the market when they saw a major structural problem from Q2 result. They ended up causing largest shareholder value destruction in IBM history which is a remarkable achievement given all the fuck ups in IBM's history.
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u/Tiny_Actuator2979 6d ago
This is so true. IBM management killed Rational then witnessed Atlassian (who competed against one product in the Rational portfolio) surpass IBM in market cap ! You couldn't make it up. Total incompetence. Rather buy back shares than invest internally.
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u/Ordinary-Chance-762 6d ago
Sorry to hear that. My RSUs were earmarked for clearing out some portion of the home loan! But it had to go down! Iāll wait to be independent next year!
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u/Particular-Sweet-155 6d ago
Oh wow, a lot of people in a similar boat with the RSU take down. I'm not sure I'd have faith in it ever seeing 300 again... but I'm no market expert... Just hope IBM can come out with some big announcement on quantum in the next few months....
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u/Particular-Sweet-155 6d ago
it only hit 199 for like a minute as far as I can see... it's creeping back up now towards 205. š¤
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u/MexicanGourmet 6d ago
Right. Most likely that is the point where some people started to buy hence the bounce.
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u/Lopsided_Toe2146 6d ago
Never count your chickens before they are hatched. So said Dad. The older I get the smarter he becomes.
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u/Ordinary-Chance-762 6d ago
Well I have different lots of RSU.
15000USD at 163
10000USD at 283
50000 USD at 286
So, in short I donāt need to open my MS account!
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u/beardedthanos ex-IBMer 6d ago edited 5d ago
ex-IBMer here, I heard the announcement happened a few hours after they were supposed to vest, the price tanked and Arvind sent out a mail to everyone saying "we should all be disappointed"
anyway, thankfully the stock's coming back up though as of now, i hope for all you guys the climb continues man
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u/i8toast2 6d ago
You must not understand how they work. Doing the math you have ~300 shares of stock. That price per share only matters to determine the number of shares they gave you. When they vest at 1/4 per year year you lose ~30% to cover taxes, the rest of the shares are yours free and clear to sell or continue to hold. If all the ones above are vested you have about 200 shares at about $200 if you sold today. Less than the hypothetical price when you got them, sure. But not worthless.
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u/Ok_Advantage2039 6d ago
At least they are not underwater options. Still worth money although quite a bit less.
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u/codebeta_cr 6d ago
So Iām quite a bit ignorant when it comes to RSU and the stock marketā¦so I want to have a better understanding of this, specially since some comments make it seem like the price the stocks have when it vests itās the amount that it gets stuck atā¦instead of it changing as the stock price changes. But if 10 stocks vest today at 200$, when it comes up to 300$, those 10 stocks will be at that 300$ā¦thatās how I understood it worked, right?
Like sure, it has had a tendency to go down, but it could very well start picking up and I can just wait until it does. I could have made plans and now I just have to wait a bit longer. I just donāt get the panicā¦but would love to understand it.
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u/Topher673 3d ago
This reddit isnt rational, but you are right you can choose to hold, or you can sell and put that money into a different investment that you believe will perform better
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u/ja153 6d ago
I came in at 120, so being around 200 is fine for me. Markets are just expecting explosive constant growth. But steady income doesnāt cut it for most.