Who’s Buying All That Stock?

If you told me companies were going to sell $700 billion worth of stock this year, I’d probably have the same reaction you would.

Seven hundred billion dollars? Who’s going to buy all that? Is the market going to be able to handle it?

Those are fair questions. That’s also where a lot of people stop. They see a giant number, decide it must be a giant problem, and move on.

Pretty soon, everybody’s passing around the same scary story. But nobody has bothered to do the math.

And there’s a question we ask around here that can save us a whole lot of trouble: Relative to what?

Tell me he weighs 300 pounds. Are we talking about a person or a horse? Because I have very different concerns depending on the answer.

Before we decide whether a number is big or small, good or bad, we need something to compare it with.

The same goes for the stock market.

And once you put that $700 billion next to the size of the market, and look at who’s buying shares, the story gets a lot more interesting.

These offerings include companies selling shares to the public for the first time and companies that are already public selling more.

That’s a lot of stock. But it’s only about 1% of the market’s value.

In other words, for every $100 of stock-market value, we’re talking about roughly $1 in offerings over the year.

Same $700 billion, same market; we just gave the number some context.

Think about a restaurant getting a reservation for 20 people.

If the place has eight seats, like some of my favorite omakase spots in New York do, there’s going to be a problem.

If it seats 500, the manager probably says, “Great. See you at seven.”

You can’t judge the size of the crowd without knowing the size of the room.

That’s what gets lost when we compare today’s dollar totals with numbers from years ago. The room got bigger.

The stock market is worth far more than it was back in 1999 or 2000.

So a record dollar amount doesn’t automatically mean we’re looking at a record burden.

You’ll hear people call those record dollar totals “nominal” records.

All that means is we’re counting the dollars without adjusting for anything else. It’s a useful number. It just doesn’t finish the job.

I’m much more interested in how big the number is compared with the thing we’re measuring.

That extra step can turn a frightening headline into a pretty ordinary math problem.

Here’s the part that surprised me: companies are expected to buy back more stock than the amount coming to market through issuance.

A buyback is exactly what it sounds like. A company “buys” its own shares “back” from investors.

Goldman’s report called for about $1.4 trillion in U.S. buybacks in 2026, compared with roughly $700 billion in new issuance.

These are full-year estimates, so the final numbers can change. But that’s the comparison we’re working with.

And the math is simple. Fourteen is twice seven. We’re talking about roughly two dollars of buybacks for every dollar of issuance.

Subtract the forecasts, and buybacks come out $700 billion ahead.

Now, if you only heard about the selling, would you have guessed that?

I wouldn’t have. I might have pictured all these companies showing up with stock to sell and wondered where the buyers were going to come from.

Meanwhile, the companies themselves are expected to spend even more buying shares back.

That doesn’t mean every company is buying. It doesn’t mean every stock will rise.

And it doesn’t mean buybacks cancel out every share handed to employees or used to buy another business.

We’re comparing two large pools of activity, not predicting next Tuesday’s closing price.

But it does make the claim that the market can’t possibly handle all this stock a lot harder to support.

The issuance is about 1% of the market. The forecast for buybacks is even larger.

Those seem like useful facts to include before we start sounding the alarm.

Big numbers get our attention. I get it. They get mine, too.

But being impressed by a number and understanding a number are two different things.

We don’t need harder math. We need one more question.

Relative to what?