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Before 1982, if a company bought its own shares to push the price up, the SEC called it what it was: market manipulation.
Then Reagan's SEC passed Rule 10b-18, and the floodgates opened.
In 2025, the Mag 7 spent $1.21 trillion on buybacks over five years. That's not investment. That's not R&D. That's the largest financial engineering project in market history.
Apple's EPS growth is 85% fake.
Same profits. Fewer shares. Wall Street cheers.
Here's what we found when we pulled the actual numbers...
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• Meta spends 90% of buybacks just to neutralize employee stock dilution
• NVIDIA: $21B spent, shares dropped 0.6%. The buyback is hidden payroll.
• 0.85 correlation between buyback timing and insider selling windows
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And here's the kicker: buyback peaks predicted market tops in 2007, 2018, and 2022. The current trailing 12-month total just peaked at $1.02 trillion. Growth is flattening — because AI capex is eating the cash.
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Full report — the complete buyback breakdown with the Mag 7 scoreboard, the SBC shell game, and what the flattening signal means:
Read The Buyback Floor
Free Portfolio X-Ray — see how buyback trends affect your specific holdings:
Run Your Free Scan
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— Scott Covert,
AI Stock Market Impacts
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