Originally Posted by
TED74
But in this example you're not including the price paid to reduce shares by 50%. There are over 650 million shares outstanding of DAL stock. It'd cost you about $18B to buy half of those shares back. You can't "increase dividend payouts without spending more money" overall.
Right. That example was for easy math. But the point is buying back stock allows you to spend the same amount of money on dividend payouts and still increase dividends. My argument is against people saying they should just increase dividend payouts. It’s a better investment to buy back stock.