Out Fox The $treet

Motorola Solutions is embarking on a Dutch Auction to repurchase $2 billion worth of shares around the current price. The stock continues to offer the highest net payout yield in the large-cap sector as the company aggressively returns capital to shareholders. Follow the smart investors and hold onto the stock. The recent stock action in Motorola Solutions (NYSE: MSI ) again provides an example of what happens when the market becomes overly negative on a large company with a solid balance sheet. The stock collapsed back in April after the company failed to find a buyer, but it didn't change the appeal of the stock for investors. Read the full article on Seeking Alpha. Disclosure: Long MSI. Please review the disclaimer page for more details. 

Very interesting announcement today by Amgen (AMGN) that the company would buy $5B of it's outstanding shares via a modified dutch auction. This would amount to roughly 10% of the outstanding stock. This puts AMGN into play for out Net Payout Yields model that looks for high yielding dividend and stock buyback companies. AMGN just recently became a dividend payer yielding roughly 2%. Also, previous buybacks have yielded about 4% over the last 12 months giving it a previous 6% NPY. Not to shabby considering most investors get excited about 3-4% dividend yields. Unfortunately AMGN announced a Senior Notes Offering to at least partially pay for this share auction. While studies aren't conclusive on whether buying stock with cheap debt is long term beneficial to shareholders, our model tends to stray away from such financial engineering. Companies that are so cheap that it can pay high NPYs via free cash flow are much more attractive. Regardless, AMGN will make our list to...