Some may be interested....NAB Share buyback announcements...

Some may be interested....

NAB Share buyback announcements (numbers bought back);

71,744,391 June 5 (only 4 mill in 3 months)
67,332,718 March 13 (over 12 mill bought in just over a month)
55,124,396 January 29

NAB bought heavily in the falling market which seems smart in hindsight. Now that the price is rising the number of shares repurchased has fallen significantly.

There are still 16 million shares left to purchase.

Thoughts;

~ seems to me that they were acting as price support in February. Perhaps the higher turnover in the shares authorised them to purchase more on any given day.
~ we will most probably see purchases increase substantially if the share price comes under pressure again.
~ NAB announced the buyback immediately after the Homeside debacle.

I am unsure what this means but a number of companies seems to be using the guise of capital management to 'influence' the share price. This is an obvious statement but Buffet talked about buybacks when there was excess capital (and nowhere else productive to use it) to increase shareholder wealth, not to support the price in a downtrend and I am unsure what it will do to their balance sheets in the long run.

For instance NTG buyback when they were in trouble, Lend Lease recently announced one & Mayne has been buying all the way down. US companies have bought back shares when they were on PE's of over 30.

Any opinions?

noip