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This is Motleyful Answers. I'm Alison Southwick and I'm joined as always by Robert Brokamp.

Hello.

Personal finance expert here at the Molly Fool. In this week's episode, we're joined by Jeannie

Thompson from Fidelity and we're going to talk about trends in retirement. And what else? That's the most important thing in the world, really. So that's all you need to say.

That's all Bro cares about. All that and more on this week's episode of Molly Full Answers.

So, Allison, what's up?

Well, bro, for as long as I've been working at The Fool, I've heard about stock buybacks, aka stock repurchases.

The typical public relation line goes that it's in the best use of the company's capital

because the stock is undervalued or the company wants to control its own destiny.

And our analysts generally greet them with like a shrug. But because

debt right now is so cheap and tax cuts are so deep, companies are allocating record levels

of capital to stock buybacks. So, is that good for investors? Is it bad? Let's dig in. Let's do it.

And we're going to do it with a bunch of metaphors. So here we go. Metaphor number one.

The most simple way to explain stock buyback is to picture a pie. Like I said, it's our first metaphor.

If a company is a pie, a single share represents one slice of that pie.

As a share owner, you get to eat more pie if the whole pie grows, such as if the company

becomes more profitable, or if the pie is cut into fewer pie slices.

Or you can think about it in pizza, if pizza is more agreeable to you.

Keesh?

How about Keats?

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