> Bingo. Would you rather have a poorly managed company hold on to their cash and spend it internally, or return it to shareholders?

It's not an either/or. A poorly managed company can make itself more dysfunctional by neglecting investment and returning too much cash to shareholders.

A poorly managed company can spend money internally on inappropriate things as well. It's not like IBM doesn't spend on R&D:

* https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/research-d...

AAPL spends on R&D, and dividends, and buybacks.

>Bingo. Would you rather have a poorly managed company hold on to their cash and spend it internally, or return it to shareholders?

I think it's a bunch of bs the way you are wording this. I know these are not your words alone, it's what people say.. but it's so misleading!

You say "return it to shareholders". Well, no. A dividend is returning to shareholders.. that's what a dividend is.

A stock repurchase is basically nothing more than the company buying back stock, and giving holders the option to sell theirs to the company..

The investor can sell the damn stock any time they want... this is NOT "returning it to shareholders".

It is a completely convoluted way to arbitrarily do a bunch of fancy things to both use cash, get stock, prop up the price even more since there is a buy pressure..

> A stock repurchase is basically nothing more than the company buying back stock, and giving holders the option to sell theirs to the company.

The point of a stock repurchase program is to decrease the number of shares on issue and therefore increase the value of each share. Theoretically share price = market cap / shares on issue.

Market cap equals share price times number of shares. But that equation can't be rearranged. Share price equals what the last person was willing to buy the stock at.

Buying back stock does raise the price. But only because it clears out the sellers that are willing to sell at lower prices and leaves the higher ask prices.