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.

I don’t think you can make an absolute statement that buy backs are a good thing (always). For instance, look at Stamps.com in the last 4 months. It went from $284 to $34 and they were aggressively buying back shares in the high $200s for quite a while. Is it better off for shareholders that they were doing that as a buyback or a dividend? The concept behinds buybacks is a good one, it makes your “slice of the pizza” bigger. But historically speaking buybacks have proven to not be a beneficial use of capital.

The example still holds. It costs money to buy the stock. You don’t just magically reduce the amount of stock and increase dividends. That money could have been used for something else even if it was just a dividend.

No, because the increase in dividend is in no way covered by the decrease of shares of the buyback. That's the scam, when all is said and done, the only benefit is to the exec's participating in the options program, where their awards were based on the higher EPS, and the value not diluted by the share issue. In reality, the shareholders only see a mere fraction of that capital, in most cases in the last decade, long term investors lost money.

End of the day, I'd rather fly my schedule and not take anything home but laundry. They can have all the money, I prefer time off with decent pay/benefits.

There’s value in that, for sure! I don’t get too wrapped up about buybacks, the whole corporate American system is rigged to cater to Wall Street and executives via quarterly earnings. The financial “advisory” industry has also capitalized on that by using it to sell fear and thus, their “expert services” to eliminate all of that scary risk.

I’d love to see corporations switch to annual reporting at most, maybe even longer intervals. That might help to start wiring our society into long term thinking as these quarterly releases are just noise, for the most part (except if you’re stamps.com)

Right.

Because Navy summer Dress Whites and Marine summer Dress Blues is the same thing as hippies smoking doobies at Woodstock as they rage against the establishment or something.

https://s14-eu5.startpage.com/cgi-bi...6791c9029516c7

Holy Cow. That idiot had to poll the audience for that?

... and 29% of THEM got it wrong? I fear for the future of this country.

No, 29% of them wanted to screw with the guy, just like naming a boat, "boaty-mc'boatface". I wish it was 79% zebraforce