Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat's commentary for the week of March 20, 2012?

Article Excerpt

Dividends are in fashion with investors right now, and that’s always a good thing. After all, creative accounting can produce false impressions of prosperity and hide embarrassing financial problems. But accounting can’t create cash for this year’s dividend, let alone conjure up a history of past dividends. Stick to dividend payers and you’ll avoid most of the market’s greatest disasters. It’s odd that while investors periodically crave cash dividends, they rarely get excited about stock buybacks. But in some ways, stock buybacks are better than dividends. In particular, they give you a tax-deferral option that you don’t get with cash dividends. Stock buybacks raise the value of a given stock holding in two ways: First, stock buybacks raise a company’s earnings per share. It’s simple arithmetic: buybacks reduce the number of shares outstanding. To get earnings per share, you divide total earnings by the number of shares outstanding. When you reduce the divisor—because the company has fewer shares outstanding, due to stock buybacks—the…