Trades with cats wrote:News feeds saying apple is now down 200 billion from the top. How much buyback has Timmy got approval for?
These are different things, no?
Apple has been buying circa 1,500,000 shares per day, if my math and memory are correct. So roughly $8 billion per month ($23.5 billion in the March 2018 quarter), maybe more now since Luca announced a buyback acceleration.
Volume today in AAPL is over 41 million shares, so even two million bought back is dwarfed by the daily flow.
From the most recent earnings call;
"... the [buyback] amount is very, very large and so we will try to execute it, as you've seen from our track record during the last five years, we will do it at a very fast pace. But we also want to do it efficiently. We want to make sure that, you know, we buy back the stock at the right time. ..."
https://www.imore.com/apple-earnings-q2-2018
I could recalculate the daily volume buyback with bigger numbers, but the buyback is not intended to counter herd movement in the stock price.
Buyback works over long time periods to shrink the float. Lower daily prices make for greater float reduction for the same buyback money.