Buybacks

About a trillion $ was spent buy public companies to purchase their own shares.  It was a record year.  But as usual, when everyone does something, few do it right.  Companies were buying shares to make their EPS ratio bigger, but they did it when the market plateaued at all time highs.  There was no more buying pressure.  Why make your numbers look good when few are buying?  Is it fun fighting over scraps?  Now there are companies with nice EPS ratios but there stock just keeps drifting down.
It seems like normally companies buy back to coax people into buying and pushing the stock price up.  That sounds ljke a bad reason to buy something but thats how people are.
Maybe they bought back shares for different reasons, like preventing a hostile takeover, to give as a bonus to employees or whatever.

What i can say is i would have argued with all of these executives and cfo's about their timing.  Horrible timing.  The people making these decisions know little.  Instead of going overboard in Q4 2015, they should have waited till Q2 or Q3 of 2016.  They could have gotten similar EPS but at a much cheaper price.  Gopro bought heavily and their stock just tanked.  Noone cared. I guess a newer company like that wont have anyone with real experience.  Established companies have more experience in their staff, they will make bad decisions.  Newer companies will nearly self implode.