It's like a tax free dividend. Dividends are taxable but if a company uses the cash they would have spent on a dividend on a buy back there's no taxable event for the investors. Those investors who want the cash can sell and pay the tax and the rest enjoy the higher share price
In a purely rational market, buying back shares doesn't boost stock price temporarily... it boosts it forever. You buy back shares and 'retire' them, thereby making everyone else's shares more valuable.
Now, if you're using debt to finance share buy backs, then yeah... it's a short term ploy. But most companies don't use buy backs this way.
> You buy back shares and 'retire' them, thereby making everyone else's shares more valuable.
But the cash outflow to purchase those shares makes the company less valuable at the same time. In a completely efficient market, the amount of money that the company pays to buy back a share should be exactly balanced by the ownership percentage of that share, resulting in no net change to the price of the company's other shares.
Yes but as a shareholder I get an untaxed unrealised capital gain instead of a taxable dividend. I’m not a fan of taxing unrealised capital gains but this particular loophole could do with closing
But the tax will be paid when the stock is sold. It is more like letting the investor choose when to realise the gain and trigger the tax vs dividend that will happen regardless of wether the investor needs the money at that time or not.
If you have more money than you're able to make good use of improving the company (r&d, acquisitions, new locations, whatever), you can give it back to investors. Which can be either a dividend or a buyback, and in theory (ie, ignoring pesky details like taxes) those are supposed to be equivalent.
Unless you're Berkshire, most investors don't want this. They buy a company for its success in widgetry. If they wanted to pay someone to invest in the market, they'd buy an actively managed fund.
That's silly. It's a business, not a charity. When I'm a shareholder in a business I don't want management wasting my capital by investing it in the stock market when they run out of growth opportunities. Just give me the cash back (preferably in the form of stock buy backs) and then I can invest that cash in other businesses myself.