The NASPP Blog

Happy New Year! We’re barely a week into the new year, so I figure I can still get away with squeezing some celebration into today’s blog. It turns out that we at the NASPP have a fair amount of congratulating to do!

Lucky on LinkedIn

Congrats to Jessica Laddon, CEP, for being the 600th person to follow the NASPP on LinkedIn. The NASPP is very social – follow us this year on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Question of the Week WINNER!

Many of our celebratory thoughts go to the winner and runners up of our Question of the Week contest. For those of you who are asking “What’s the Question of the Week Contest?“, it’s a weekly quiz challenge designed for stock plan professionals to test their know-how in a variety of areas, while competing against their peers. There’s a new question each week, and a correct answer earns points.

And the Winners Are…

A big congrats to screen name alias mamandmore for coming out on top of our 2013 contest, with a score of 515. The screen names of the top 5 scorers are:

mamaandmore (515 points)
edodge (510 points)
Flower power 121 (480 points)
TestMe (465 points)
Lucky13 (430 points)

What’s in a Name?

In reviewing the scores from last year’s challenge, I couldn’t help but observe the originality of some of the screen names users are deploying in our contest. It seems nothing was off limits, from the range of “equity” and “stock” possibilities (Dividend Dame, Shera Queen of Equity, StockNerd, 2013 Scrambled Regs) to the patriotic (Starspangled) to impersonators (Paul Bunyan, Peter Pan, Scooby and Jane Austen, to name a few). Of course our sports fans were abundant as well (RedsFan, Patriots Fan), in addition to a few that would probably require a happy hour and some time to explain (Duke City Dude, No name game player, The Colorful Finch).

Work Hard, Play Hard

We’ve just reset scores and this week’s challenge starts a whole new contest, so this is the perfect time for NASPP members to sign up, create your screen alias and jump into the Question of the Week Contest. We leave all of January’s questions active for the entire month, so you have plenty of time to complete the first quizzes of the new game.

Equity Expert Podcast

We’d love for you to join us in celebrating our very first NASPP podcast series: Equity Expert. That’s right, you can download short episodes right to your computer, smartphone or other device and listen to them at your leisure. This series focuses on short interviews with some of the industry’s best and brightest. The first few episodes will offer general advice for establishing yourself as an expert in this industry. Later episodes will capture short bits of “how to” advice on very specific topics. Our inaugural episode features the NASPP’s Executive Director, Barbara Baksa. Next week’s episode will be an interview with John Hammond of Plan Management Corporation. It’s free: subscribe now!

I wish all of you an incredible year.

-Jennifer