A belief that the stock had bottomed would, IMO, constitute incentive to exercise and hold.
That’s true for stock options in general, of course. What I was trying to say in my prior post (but evidently did badly) was that there is no company-specific incentive for MNTA directors to convert their options into shares prior to the deadline for owning a nominal number of actual shares.
“The efficient-market hypothesis may be the foremost piece of B.S. ever promulgated in any area of human knowledge!”