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Analyzing Share Buybacks: The Big Picture

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

The month of March has been all about share repurchase programs here at Calcbench, with numerous posts and pieces of research dissecting how buyback programs work and how analysts can evaluate those efforts.

Today we offer a recap of all that material, so that Calcbench subscribers can understand everything available to them to analyze buyback programs and how you can get started analyzing the firms you follow.

First is a research note we published in early March, reviewing how much money firms have spent on share buybacks in the last decade and which firms have been the biggest spenders. Apple ($AAPL) tops the list by far and away, spending $479.55 billion on share repurchases from 2012 through 2021 — but corporations spent more than $6.52 trillion on buybacks overall in that period. Download our research note to see our full findings.

Second, we also have two pieces from columnist Jason Voss unpacking all the details of how share buyback programs work:

Part 1 shows readers how to use the Consolidated Statement of Shareholders’ Equity to find information related to share repurchase programs, and how you can follow those disclosures from one year to the next to understand the full picture of buyback activity.
Part 2 then shows how you can analyze all that data to determine whether share buybacks are the best use of a company’s capital. Voss uses the example of Nvidia ($NVDA) to compare spending on buybacks versus spending on R&D, and then to assess the returns of each choice.

Third, Calcbench built an Excel template that subscribers can use to perform the same analysis Voss did for firms beyond Nvidia. You can download the template and then use it for your own analysis by entering the ticker symbols for firms you follow. (Please note, that interactive feature will only work for Calcbench subscribers. If you’re not a subscriber and want a trial of the service, just contact us at info@calcbench.com.)

And as you might have guessed by now, we love this stuff. If you have special requests related to share buyback research, we’re happy to hear your needs and see how we can help with one-off projects or research requests; again, just drop us an email to get the conversation started. We have millions of pieces of financial data in our archives, so whatever you’re hoping to do, we have the data to do it somewhere in there.

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Analyzing Share Buybacks: The Big Picture