With a dividend, you get an amount of income, X, and you get to keep the stock and sell it in the future for even more money, Y. Yes, you get taxed on it both times. But you get two payments of income: X and Y, both taxed at capital gains rates.
With a buyback, you might get X income. But in order to get you X gains the company needs to pay Z (current share price), which is always more expensive than paying a dividend (generally for dividend paying companies, a share trades for 10x-100x the amount the dividend would be for). So the company either pays 100x or it buys back less stock, rewarded fewer investors. Additionally, any shareholder that participates in the buyback is now closed off from getting income Y for any stock sold back. Alternatively, if you don't participate in the buyback, you must hope the company maintains or grows its share price, or else your gains fall below X and you're no longer deferring tax, you're just losing money.
(IOW, for the same amount of cash, a buyback is several times less efficient at returning gains to investors as a dividends. And this means that rather than increasing the price per share, buybacks frequently have the opposite effect, or no effect, because the company also has significantly less cash on hand after the buyback.
Then why do companies love buybacks? Executives love buybacks because it lets them exchange their equity compensation out-of-schedule. This is the primary driving force behind the rise of buybacks. The reason they open buybacks to the public is to avoid running afoul of SEC insider trader regulations.)
With a buyback, you might get X income. But in order to get you X gains the company needs to pay Z (current share price), which is always more expensive than paying a dividend (generally for dividend paying companies, a share trades for 10x-100x the amount the dividend would be for). So the company either pays 100x or it buys back less stock, rewarded fewer investors. Additionally, any shareholder that participates in the buyback is now closed off from getting income Y for any stock sold back. Alternatively, if you don't participate in the buyback, you must hope the company maintains or grows its share price, or else your gains fall below X and you're no longer deferring tax, you're just losing money.
(IOW, for the same amount of cash, a buyback is several times less efficient at returning gains to investors as a dividends. And this means that rather than increasing the price per share, buybacks frequently have the opposite effect, or no effect, because the company also has significantly less cash on hand after the buyback.
Then why do companies love buybacks? Executives love buybacks because it lets them exchange their equity compensation out-of-schedule. This is the primary driving force behind the rise of buybacks. The reason they open buybacks to the public is to avoid running afoul of SEC insider trader regulations.)