“Celebrity investor Carl Icahn made news when he bought over $1 billion of Apple stock earlier this year, but Icahn’s investment pales in comparison to the company’s own $60 billion stock buyback program, which gobbled up $16 billion in shares over the June quarter,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider.
“At the beginning of the current quarter, Apple had $44 billion left of its buyback budget, which wasn’t due to be spent before 2015 according to the terms of the buyback plan,” Dilger writes. “It’s also optional; Apple could decide to stop buying shares and simply let the plan expire. However, given that Apple splurged a third of its allocated share buyback funds in the June quarter to buy up 36 million shares at an average price of $444, it appears likely that it has continued to aggressively take advantage of its acutely low stock price over the past three months.”
Dilger writes, “Apple could turn in another record quarter of buybacks that match or exceed the value-performance of the June quarter, easily erasing another 36 million outstanding shares or potentially as many as 100 million shares, were Apple to buy all the stock its current buyback plan allowed at the price levels available in July.”
Much more in the full article here.