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Share buyback (stock repurchase)

A share buyback is a company using its cash to repurchase its own shares, reducing the share count and returning capital to remaining shareholders.

A share buyback, or stock repurchase, is when a company buys back its own shares from the market. Because the total profit is now spread over fewer shares, buybacks tend to raise earnings per share and can support the share price. Along with dividends, they are one of the two main ways companies return cash to shareholders.

Buybacks are flexible — a company can pause them in hard times, unlike a dividend that markets expect to be maintained. But they are not automatically good: a company that buys back stock at inflated prices, or borrows to do it, can destroy value. The best buybacks are funded by genuine free cash flow at sensible prices.

stocks-llm does not track buyback programs as a stored dataset, but the free cash flow that funds them is surfaced from SEC filing data with its as-of date. This definition is educational, not a recommendation.

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