[manfredo]

That's not how it worked at the companies I've been at. Your stock grants were determined at the time you join, and your refreshers are determined in January or February. You are granted $X worth of stock, so in that sense the stock units are based on monetary value.

But if you are granted $100k worth of stock in February, and the stock price drops by half in March you're only getting $50k worth of stock. Come next February, your stock grant will probably have a higher number of units to account for the drop in price, but you still earned less than $100k in stock the previous year.