How Many Shares does Apple Have?

On my Robinhood account I'm buying stocks that pay dividends. Another thing that interests me is when companies buy their own stock. When a company does this, the supply of the stock goes down, so hopefully the demand goes up - (Economics 101: Supply and Demand are inverses of each other). When the demand goes up, the price of the stock goes up, and you "make more money". You don't actually make the money until you sell the stock.

Apple has been buying back their stock, which can be seen by looking at the quarterly financial statements - http://investor.apple.com/financials.cfm. The reason I usually use Apple for investing examples is because a lot of people know what Apple is.

I don't really understand the difference between basic and diluted shares when calculating these financial statements. I tried looking it up, but I was still confused. For the sake of this blog post, I'm going to go with the "basic" number of shares. Below are the number of basic shares since Fiscal Year 2014, Quarter 1. Yes, these numbers are in billions.

• FY14 Q1 - 6,272,504,000 
• FY14 Q2 - 6,123,302,000
• FY14 Q3 - 6,012,635,000
• FY14 Q4 - 5,933,845,000
• FY15Q1 - 5,843,082,000
• FY15Q2 - 5,793,799,000
• FY15Q3 - 5,729,886,000
• FY15Q4 - 5,646,916,000
• FY16Q1 - 5,558,930,000
• FY16Q2 - 5,514,381,000
• FY16Q3 - 5,443,058,000

As you can see from the numbers above, Apple has been buying back their stock. Even though the stock price of Apple hasn't moved much in over a year, I'm happy with holding on to my Apple stock due to this buyback and also due to Apple's dividend payments. 

If Apple needs more money, they can introduce more shares back into the market. Just because Apple is buying back their shares, it doesn't mean they'll continue to do it regularly until they've bought back all of their shares. 

I need to look at other companies and see if they're buying back their stocks too!

Signed,

Mitch