That may come as a surprise to companies that, hoping to impress investors, have voluntarily said they will start expensing their stock options.

The 79 companies that have said they will start expensing stock options have seen their shares gain just 7% on average since the announcements, according to a USA TODAY analysis. That's well below the 9% rise in the Standard & Poor's 500 index during the same period.

''This expensing stock options thing is bunk,'' says Robert Olstein, manager of the Olstein Financial Alert fund. ''A guy like me looks right through it.'' Why are Olstein and others underwhelmed?

* Analysts are planning to ignore the stock-options charges anyway. Wall Street analysts, who generate earnings expectations followed by most investors, will simply remove the charge in their estimates, says Robert Willens, accounting analyst at Lehman Bros.

* The effect is small at most of the companies making the change. Earnings would be hit by only about 4% at the companies making the change. Most high-tech companies, where the effect would be much greater, are still holding out.

''The difference was not as dramatic as some feared,'' says Jay Sugarman, CEO of iStar Financial. Earnings would have been less than 1% lower at the financial-services company last year had it expensed stock options.

* Traders, who have been behind much of the market's moves lately, don't worry about things like option expensing beyond making a quick profit from any initial move in the stock. ''These are short-term traders,'' says Alan Rosenfield, president of money-management firm Expansion Funds America.

In fact, there is an initial reaction, just no follow-through. It turns out that the 79 companies beat the S&P 500 by seven-tenths of a percentage point on the day of the announcement, says John Hand, professor of accounting at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. But just one day after the announcement, the shares started to sag. And two weeks later, the shares lagged by 2.5 percentage points, he says.

* Stock-option costs aren't hidden anyway. Investors who really wanted to know how much stock options cost the company could look up the effect in the footnotes each year, says Jack Dolmat-Connell, vice president of Clark/Bardes Consulting, an executive compensation consulting firm.

Olstein says the best thing investors can do is ignore the furor over expensing options. ''It doesn't mean anything,'' he says.

-- Matt Krantz 

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