Share Buybacks Turn Toxic…”Something broke in the gears of financial engineering!”
by Wolf Richter
WolfStreet.com
March 21, 2016
Companies are still borrowing and spending billions on buying back their own shares – one of the big drivers behind the blistering stock market rally of the past few years. It worked wonderfully and without fail. But suddenly, it’s doing the opposite, and now the shares of the biggest buyback queens are getting hammered. Something broke in the gears of this financially engineered market!
During the November-January period, 378 of the S&P 500 companies bought back their own shares, according to FactSet. Total buybacks in the quarter rose 5.2% from a year ago, to $136.6 billion. Over the trailing 12 months (TTM), buybacks totaled $568.9 billion.
That’s an enormous amount of corporate cash that was dumped on the market!
The sector that blew – “blew” because that’s how it turned out – the most money on this type of financial engineering project was Information Technology, with $33.2 billion in buybacks last quarter. Four of the top 10 buyback queens were Information Technology: Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Visa.
Apple alone blew $6 billion in the quarter, even as its stock was tanking. Relative to its average share price over the period, it paid a 13% premium, the second highest premium paid by S&P 500 companies, after Symantec! Over the trailing 12 months, Apple blew nearly $40 billion on buybacks, and yet its stock dropped 15.5%.
The Rest…HERE
