Link below and text is from and email by one of the Oxford Club authors, Marc Lichtenfeld. He gives three companies as examples of when management should not be buying back their own stock. Looks like they laid off the wrong people.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.oxfordclub.com/emails/images/20190114WER-Chart-3.jpg
ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) looks like the poster child for management buying at the wrong time.
If these companies had made acquisitions for the same amount that they spent on their own stocks, and if those deals had gone as badly as these stock purchases, many of these CEOs would be spending their days at home scanning LinkedIn job postings.
I have always maintained that if a company has extra cash, it should give it back to shareholders in the form of dividends. Let investors decide if the stock is cheap enough to buy. If it is, they'll plow their dividends back into the stock.
But that doesn't help executives get bonuses like reducing share count to artificially inflate earnings per share or stock price does.