Stock buybacks: shrinking the share count is not a dividend
A buyback is the company using cash to retire its own stock. Authorization is a ceiling, not cash spent. EPS can rise while the business did not. Read Item 703, not the press release.
Stocks
A stock is a company. An index is a scoreboard.
Search traffic still confuses “the market” with a single ticker. An index is a formula. A stock is a claim on one business.