“With Apple Inc.’s repurchases staking a claim as the most profitable on record, buybacks remain one of America’s most popular antidotes to bears,” Oliver Renick and Joseph Ciolli report for Bloomberg.
“The iPhone maker is up 25 percent since it spent $18 billion on its own shares between January and March and rallied 32 percent after a $16 billion buyback in 2013,” Renick and Ciolli report. “Those are the highest four-month returns among the 20 biggest quarterly repurchases by any company since 1998, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Standard & Poor’s. S&P 500 constituents have spent $211 billion on their own stock this year amid concern the five-year bull market is prone to selloffs such as last week’s 2.7 percent retreat.”
“‘[Apple’s] timing was impeccable,’ Todd Lowenstein, who helps manage $16 billion at Highmark Capital Management in Los Angeles, said in a July 31 phone interview. ‘They went in big, and it said to the market that they had confidence in their business plan and thought their stock was grossly undervalued. That’s worked out well for them,'” Renick and Ciolli report. “The ratio of Apple’s per-share profit growth to its overall earnings has increased due to buybacks. Per-share income climbed 19.6 percent last quarter from a year ago compared with a 12.3 percent rise in net income.”
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