Stock Buybacks Surpass $1 Trillion

Corporate stock buybacks for 2025 have surpassed $1 trillion U.S. According to data from Birinyi Associates, announced share buybacks are forecast to hit a record $1.3 trillion U.S. by year’s end. The three largest contributors to buybacks among publicly traded U.S. companies are Apple (AAPL) at $100 billion U.S., Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG) at $70 billion U.S., and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) at $50 billion U.S. In a separate note, Citadel Securities noted that corporate stock buybacks are averaging about $4.4 billion U.S. per day this year, driven by demand among investors. A stock buyback, or share repurchase, is when a company buys its own outstanding shares on the open market, reducing the number of shares available to the public. Buybacks increase the ownership stake of remaining stockholders and boost the share price by reducing the available supply.For these reasons, many shareholders demand and expect publicly traded companies to buyback their own stock, leading to record levels of share repurchases in recent years. However, critics of buybacks say that they reward shareholders at the expense of reinvestments into a business and its staff. Critics also claim that stock buybacks reward chief executive officers and senior executives of publicly traded companies who receive share-based compensation. That said, many notable investors are advocates for stock buybacks, including Warren Buffett. In his 2023 shareholder letter, Buffett wrote: “When you are told that all repurchases are harmful to shareholders or to the country, or particularly beneficial to CEOs, you are listening to either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue (characters that are not mutually exclusive).”Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/BRK.B) spent a record $27 billion U.S. on stock buybacks in 2021 as the legendary investor found few external opportunities in the market.