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Be Careful What You Hope For - Buy-Back Mountain
We noted yesterday the apparent perfect (ill)-market-timing of increases in corporate buybacks and nowhere is this more evident than across Europe. The following chart might just make all those activist shareholder mom-and-pops, demanding CEOs 'use' their cash hordes, think twice... it appears the CEOs really don't have better crystal balls than the rest of us...
Chart: Goldman Sachs
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Buy at the top CEO's... That's what you spent 4 years at Wharton learning how to do... [with 'minors' in beer pong & parachute jumping]...
Ahhh... Nothin Like 2 Billionaires Having A Fiats Money Fight ...
Not as fun as 3 drunk Russians, but, okay.
Boris, I wait to hear your story of the meteorite? It was good no?
Meteorite good is for economy. Break many windows.
These guys are going to get hosed in the coming months.
http://marcfabersblog.blogspot.ca/
Except they probably are exercising warrants/options and THE COMPANIES are buying it for them at the top. CEO's are making out -- make no mistake. We're within 30 days of a top. They'll have to sell to the sheeple soon to bank profits.
The corporate shareholders are the ones getting stuck with the tab for the buybacks, while upper-level management that includes CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc. of the stock-compensated kind can be dumping their vested shares, and en masse, at the same time (just ask Google's former CEO or RIM's current one).
Looked at the insider distribution of T yesterday. All that moolah coming out of the pension fund that was just funded with 9B in stock. Maybe I'm cynical, but I see an agenda there.
The CEO's will do anything to remain in power. This includes burning down the ship if that allows them to remain at the wheel until the end or until they can exit with their 'just' rewards.
<There are always exceptions to this rule, but they are few and far between these days.>
Insiders dumping shares into the corporate buybacks is nothing short of looting the inherent value of the common stock. This behavior should be considered criminal in nature.
As for Buyback Mountain, the "market" is perfectly efficient at pulling forward any and all perceived value...or said another way, a frontrunner's delight.
The moral rot and financial theft in this nation extends well beyond DC and Wall Street, and into corporate boardrooms all across the nation.
Wall Street's "equity markets" are one of the most clever institutions ever devised to obtain a license to literally steal money in the history of mankind, especially with the "bailout backstop" so many of their well-connected tickers have in relation to fractional fiat central banks/printshops (and the Treasury Departments given marching orders by them).
You are exactly right in what you say, Cdad. This is a calculated method to steal shareholder funds.
1. Corporate insiders grant themselves shares and options with various executive remuneration plans, using shareholder funds.
2. The insiders ramp the shares with buybacks and crossbuying, using shareholder funds
3. The insiders sell shares into the buyback, stealing shareholder funds.
4. The company then issues shares at the inflated price, attracting new sucker funds.
5. General mismanagement and crappy fundamentals eventually pop the share price. Go to step 1, rinse and repeat.
They're using corporate loans at low rates to buy their own shares.
Psst. Hey. Anyone want to buy some insider information? It's about as useful as outsider information.
I'm seriously thinking about becoming a Goldman Sachs client so I can fade their recommendations...
you think there are more recos than what ZH is publishing?
It's just part of the francis_sawyer comedy routine...
Is THAT what you've been doing?
For the sake of all ZH'ers... Please don't tell me you want to see the ALTERNATIVE...
Exactly. Buybacks prop up the price and create liquidity for insider sales. Is there any reason why we would expect the chart to look different?
Here is the game:
1. Corp insiders want to cash in on all the massive stock options they have been granted. The board helps them out.
2. The insiders fill out a selling plan.
3. Once in place, a few months later the board agrees to a buyback plan "at the request of shareholders".
4. Since the insiders plan was already in place months prior, there is nothing improper.
4. Corp uses funds to buyback stock which in turn makes it easier for the company to claim they are bullish all the while insiders dump (bearish).
5. If the price later tanks, board will say "We were buyers of the stock and still are buyers of the stock" - removing any questioning of the insiders who sold. They will always use the "diversification of assets" meme when selling.
This enables the insiders to use the corp funds to enrich themselves further.
Indeed. You might not want to crawl into that particular tent head first...
Mercury - Are you suggesting to crawl "back into" the tent?
The proof keeps coming in that individual investors are afraid of betting on individual stocks, choosing instead to go with a broad Fed-financed equity market: sticking with target funds, index funds, and ETFs.
Howard Gold, writing today on The End of an Investing Era on MarketWatch, uses material from the WSJ and other sources to make this point, saying “With one big, bright red exception… individual stock investors may be a dying breed.”
He cites a WSJ report from BetterInvesting (formerly the National Association of Investors Corp.) that has seen membership at investor clubs where people get together to pick stocks plummet from 400,000 at its peak in 1998 down now to a mere 39,000, a plunge of 90%.
“The problem, The Journal wrote: ‘Stocks aren’t fun anymore; they are scary.’”
Gold’s point substantiates conjecture that investors are betting on the Fed to keep the market up rather than trying to figure out what company has a good idea, what company has good product, what company is a market leader. It’s too dangerous.
These investment clubs lost a ton of money trying to figure out which stocks were going up. They got sandbagged. People now just say, heck, the market’s going up; I just need to buy the index.
The problem is that Bernanke is forsaking the economy for an illusion. When American businessmen no longer are able to realize which things work and which don’t, that’s the last chapter. Not only has Bernanke destroyed sound money; he has destroyed the key incentives and market indicators for growth.
As Mises put it: Under pure socialism, economic calculations would be impossible.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-end-of-an-investing-era-2013-02-15
Where's Charles Biderman when you need him?
Invest in Broke Back Mountain!
IBM
Meanwhile they jettison by the thousands, but never mentioned by MSM.
CEO - :"Hey feck it, it's just corporate cash". " Now sell my personal shares please".
duh, they use the corp money to buy their shares as they dump them.. what is the problem here?
spoken like a true Goldmanite - well done dark pools
Gasp! The Rut is quarter point in the red... Where's Boilermaker??!