You are all kinds of confused.
1) "stock warrants were issued at 10 cents per share, and the share price is around 25 cents...Clearly thats a 250% return" is not true no matter what sense you are using "were issued at". Warrants are options. They have strike prices and premiums. Your return when you exercise an option (or warrant) is (stock price - strike)/premium. You are using some incorrect assumption that strike and premium are the same which is silly.
2) Exercising warrants prior to expiration is always a bad move (with a few odd exceptions) because it blows away all the time value of the option. The CEO calls me onb the phone and asks me to exercise my warrants I'm going to say "Blow me. And I still won't".
3) CEO wanted to force option exercise should have issued callable convertible debt. Then he could call the debt and force conversion which is like forcing someone to exercise warrants. Good help is hard to find even from pricey investment banks.
It wouldn't be that way. If the exercies price of the warrants was 10c and the shares were 25c then the warrant price would be 15c+
If you got the warrants for nothing then you could either sell them for 15c+ or pay 10c to exercise and sell the stock for 25c.
But you may not exercise if there is time value remaining and you think the shares would go higher. Unless theshares were paying dividends which you might want to collect.
Otherwise you have the gearing of your warrants.
Two other points: The warrants may not be tradeable and also the first exercise/subscription date may be still in the future.
Lets say the stock warrants were issued at 10 cents per share, and the share price is around 25 cents... why would the CEO have a little bit of trouble getting people to exercise the warrants?
Clearly thats a 250% return. Is it because it would be hard to sell the shares immediately?
