insider7
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Channel-check analysts warning of Peak iPhone are priming Apple shares for monster buybacks
The author of this article said, "Who's winning the most from Apple's irrationally low stock price? Ironically, it's Apple and its shareholders. That's because Apple has been burning through its capital return program, buying back billions worth of shares at prices that are stupidly low."
For all practical purposes, I don't see how Apple's share buyback program is helping me at all. When you have 5.5B shares on the market, retiring 700 million shares will increase the EPS and lower the PE; but so what? The stock price won't necessarily go up, as we have seen. In contrast, if that money were paid out to shareholders, I would get a clear benefit.
Apple used $80B to buy back its stock between August 2012 and March 2015; over the same period, they paid out about $32B in dividends (an annual rate of roughly 2% of the stock price). If they had used that $80B to increase dividends, the rate would be so high (~5-6.0%) that AAPL would be an extremely attractive stock. I believe it's per share value would be much higher under that scenario.
