Why Corporate America’s Stock Buyback Binge May Be Coming to an End

Wall Street pros love talk about how regular investors are terrible market timers and thus should just buy and hold for the long haul. Small investors tend to panic sell at the lows and greedily buy at the highs. Hedge funds and active mutual funds are badly lagging their performance benchmarks as "alpha" — risk-adjusted outperformance — disappears and stocks across the market increasingly rise and fall together.