Apple's response to a bad quarter is to spend, spend, spend...
Buying $110B of your own stock is legal, but isn't a good look. It's earnings season and Apple showed less-than-stellar performance over the second quarter of 2024, but had a solution. Was it to invest in the next must-have tech gadget? Maybe build its own AI model or search engine so that it doesn't have to rely on Google's technology in those areas? No, it was to spend $110 billion on its own shares - the largest share buyback in American history and a movie that the markets loved. But - as we discuss in the Kettle you can watch below -stock buybacks (a practice that used to be illegal until the 1980s) are a bit of a red flag. When tech companies stop investing in development and start slashing the cash on buy their own shares - we're looking at you IBM, Intel, Google, Boeing etc…