mpantone

SpamSandwich said:

I don’t think that’s how stock buybacks work. If they could buy more AAPL any time the stock took a hit they’d be incentivized to pile on with negative news to drive down the stock, just like short sellers. It’s my understanding these stock repurchases are pre-timed and have nothing to do with market fluctuations.

There are multiple ways of executing a stock buyback.

One is the tender offer; this entails a buyback offer to shareholders. There's an application process, sorting processing, and ultimately some but not necessarily all of the tender offers are approved. This method requires notification in written form.

Another method is the Accelerated Share Repurchase (ASR) which is executed by a brokerage. The company buying back its shares needs to advance the cash to the brokerage and a forward contract is written up to outline terms (price, quantity, etc.). This is generally faster than the tender offer and the pricing can be more carefully controlled.

A third method is open market. That's right, the company buys back its own shares on its own. The challenge with this one is that often the open market repurchase will cause the share price to climb rapidly due to the smaller float and the increased value of the outstanding shares. This is more easily executed than the previous two methods but it is beneficial to have the cash on hand. Of course, the share price can change rapidly.

This past week's market conditions were ideal for an open market stock repurchase. Apple has plenty of cash. This is a fairly rare opportunity for companies like Apple to increase shareholder value.

LOL, now there is finally a reasonable appeal to updating to Catalina.

But no, I think I will stay at Mojave...

  

Let's make one thing very, Very, VERY clear.

There's a differing level of credibility between the following groups (ranked from highest to lowest):

• Opinions from analysts whose firms actually have investing clients. These are people who are paid to increase client portfolios.
• Opinions from analysts whose outside research firms. These are people who are paid to sell reports.
• Opinions from print media. These are people who are paid to sell periodicals.
• Opinions from online media (including bloggers, vloggers, etc.). These are people who are paid for pageviews/ad impressions.

The latter are the least credible.

If you really understood the financial markets, you'd be making a hell of a lot more investing rather than writing.

I predict that Wacom's current stance will be considered inadequate and insincere by privacy advocates, eventually resulting in a halt to the data collection and a more substantial apology issued by the company's PR department.

The company is a high risk for a class action lawsuit at this point.

Pity, I enjoy my Wacom Intuos tablet, even if it is only lightly used. 

I won't stop using it completely but I am disappointed.

MplsP said:

The real question is how do the privacy features and tracking prevention compare to Safari? I use Safari windows as my default browser the majority of the time, but there are some sites that don’t play nice with private windows and others that require Internet Explorer or Chrome (don’t ask me why a site is requiring a deprecated browser) Even though it’s built on chromium I’d rather have MS Edge than Google Chrome

The sensible stance would be to assume that the new Microsoft Edge browser doesn't do anything more than Google Chrome to block ads, tracking cookies, malicious scripts, etc.

It still is advisable to install an ad blocker -- not for ad blocking purposes -- but for security reasons.

It is also probably safer to assume that Microsoft Edge will phone home and transmit user activity to Microsoft.

There are other options. I don't use Brave because I don't trust Brandon Eich plus the fact that Brave Software is trying to monetize "safe" ads.

There are ungoogled versions of the Chromium web browser. Those are certainly worth considering as is heavy use of incognito mode for casual browsing.

But that's just me...