Money and Finance
- Does Ibm Love Or Hate Itself?
There is a rare type of organism that eats itself alive. One of them is International Business Machines Corp. For the past 20 years, IBM has been an avid, methodical buyer of its own stock. In 1993, it had 2.3 billion shares outstanding. Today it has...
- Can A Total Shareholder Yield Etf Work?
A rare mid-week post, but earlier today I read an interesting article on Forbes about the Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF (SYLD), which was based on an interview with the Cambria CIO. So I decided to dig into the story a little this evening. The SYLD...
- Should We Do Away With Dividend Yield?
We may not like it, but buybacks are here to stay. Management teams prefer buybacks for a number of reasons, even though those reasons may not always be in the best interests of their shareholders. So ingrained are buybacks in today's market that...
- Why Fewer Buybacks And More Dividends Would Be A Good Thing
Since certain financial regulations were loosened by the U.S. Congress in 1982 (rule 10b-18, to be specific), company stock repurchases -- commonly known as buybacks -- have rapidly become a preferred means of returning cash to shareholders. With buybacks,...
- High Yield Reads 3/22/14
Happy Spring. Summary of recents posts and pieces of interest, sometimes enduring, to dividend investors: Jason Zweig: on the downsides of share buybacks. Looking at the Russell 3000 he reports that after the index went up 33.5% and trades at a...
Money and Finance
Will Stock Buybacks Bite Back? - by Jason Zweig
Link to article: Will Stock Buybacks Bite Back?
As the bull market soars ever higher, investors face big competition for buying the shares of companies—and it comes from the companies themselves.
Last year, the corporations in the Russell 3000, a broad U.S. stock index, repurchased $567.6 billion worth of their own shares—a 21% increase over 2012, calculates Rob Leiphart, an analyst at Birinyi Associates, a research firm in Westport, Conn. That brings total buybacks since the beginning of 2005 to $4.21 trillion—or nearly one-fifth of the total value of all U.S. stocks today.
There has been a lot of talk in the past few years about how index funds, which buy and hold stocks regardless of whether they are cheap or expensive, might be contributing to an overvaluation of the U.S. stock market. But the companies that make up the U.S. stock market might be contributing even more. And, if you wanted a signal of when to get in and out of the market, doing the opposite of whatever companies themselves are doing would serve you pretty well.
- Does Ibm Love Or Hate Itself?
There is a rare type of organism that eats itself alive. One of them is International Business Machines Corp. For the past 20 years, IBM has been an avid, methodical buyer of its own stock. In 1993, it had 2.3 billion shares outstanding. Today it has...
- Can A Total Shareholder Yield Etf Work?
A rare mid-week post, but earlier today I read an interesting article on Forbes about the Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF (SYLD), which was based on an interview with the Cambria CIO. So I decided to dig into the story a little this evening. The SYLD...
- Should We Do Away With Dividend Yield?
We may not like it, but buybacks are here to stay. Management teams prefer buybacks for a number of reasons, even though those reasons may not always be in the best interests of their shareholders. So ingrained are buybacks in today's market that...
- Why Fewer Buybacks And More Dividends Would Be A Good Thing
Since certain financial regulations were loosened by the U.S. Congress in 1982 (rule 10b-18, to be specific), company stock repurchases -- commonly known as buybacks -- have rapidly become a preferred means of returning cash to shareholders. With buybacks,...
- High Yield Reads 3/22/14
Happy Spring. Summary of recents posts and pieces of interest, sometimes enduring, to dividend investors: Jason Zweig: on the downsides of share buybacks. Looking at the Russell 3000 he reports that after the index went up 33.5% and trades at a...