While it should be no surprise to anyone that buybacks have been a major support of the market for the last few years (as we explicitly showed here [2] and here [3] in terms of earnings manipulation and here in terms of ill-timing [4]), the following chart may give some pause for thought as to whether that is now a good thing or not. Not only is the credit market 'atlas' starting to shrug at its own 'frothiness', as it is used-and-abused by every poor-performing company to borrow-and-lever give-backs to shareholders, but the amount of 'outperformance' of the Buyback 'achievers' index (A gauge of companies that repurchased at least 5% of their shares in the previous 12 months) over the market is eerily similar now to the size of the outperformance at the top in 2007...
[5]
Charts: Bloomberg