how to purchase shares Companies making profits typically have two uses for those profits. Firstly, some part of profits can be distributed to shareholders in the form of dividends or stock repurchases. The remainder, termed shareholders� equity, are kept inside the company and used for investing in the future of the company. If companies can reinvest most of their retained earnings profitably, then they may do so. However, sometimes companies may find that some or all of their retained earnings cannot be reinvested to produce acceptable returns.Financial markets are unable to accurately gauge the meaning of repurchase announcements, because companies will often announce repurchases and then fail to complete them.2 Repurchase completion rates increased after companies were required to retroactively disclose their repurchase activity, the result of an effort to reduce the perceived or potential exploitation of public investors.2 Normally, investors have more of an adverse reaction to dividend cuts than postponing or even abandoning the share buyback program. So, rather than pay out larger dividends during periods of excess profitability then having to reduce them during leaner times, companies prefer to pay out a conservative portion of their earnings, perhaps half, with the aim of maintaining an acceptable level of dividend cover. Some evidence of this phenomenon for United States firms is provided by Alok Bhargava who found that higher dividend payments lower share repurchases though the converse is not true (Bhargava, 2010).http://www.purchasesharesonline.com