Alphabet shifts from buying back its stock to selling new shares

For years, Google was one of the biggest buyers of Google stock. This fall it stopped buying and started selling brand-new shares into the market instead, and hedge funds ran for the exit. The swing is huge. Alphabet bought back $11.5 billion of its own stock in the third quarter of last year. In the same quarter this year it bought back zero and sold $12.4 billion of new shares. A company quietly buying its own stock every quarter is a steady buyer propping up the price. Once that buyer turns into a seller, the stock trades a lot differently. Meta just did the same thing. Five days after reporting its first negative free cash flow quarter in more than a decade, it launched a stock sale that can reach $97.5 billion, including a $60 billion program to drip new shares into the market…