At 7am each weekday the stock exchange announcements are published and people like me race through them looking for anything exciting. It is a bit like panning for gold. There is a lot of dull grey grit and the odd exciting gleam: a takeover, a profit warning, the unexpected ejection of a chief executive or chairman.
In the past couple of years more of the grit has comprised share-buyback notices, where companies buy their own shares and cancel them. Some days it seems that they dominate all other items. On Tuesday, for example, 59 of the 300-odd corporate announcements carried the “transaction in own shares” label, so in some way connected with a buyback. On Wednesday it was 128 out of 474.
That is not
