Jeremy Schwartz, the director or research over at WisdomTree, is one of my favorite writers to follow (you can find his archived commentary under Institutional Reads > WisdomTree in the blogroll or here.)
A couple fund reads:
The Importance Of Dividends And Buybacks* Ratios For Gauging Equity Values
When Will Apple and Google Start Paying Dividends?
The last paper has a chart that is instructive, Figure 1 below, and I have used some of the data to show what is the % mix for dividends and buybacks by sector. As you can see, at least for the past year, 7 out of the 10 sectors paid out more in distributions through buybacks than through dividends. Food for thought.
Click on chart to enlarge:
