One number per company per year, read from the document the company signed. Nothing estimated, nothing bought from a vendor.
Every public company in the United States states its share count on the cover page of its annual report (10-K) and quarterly report (10-Q). We read that number for every filing since 1999. From 2009 on it comes through the SEC's XBRL data, before that from the filing text itself. Each company page lists every fiscal year we used and links to the filing on EDGAR, so you can check any number in one click.
Retired since peak is 100 minus today's share count divided by the highest share count the company reported since 1999. The peak is measured, not assumed: AutoZone peaked in 1999, AIG peaked in 2011. The 5-year and 1-year figures compare today with the count five years and one year earlier.
A 2-for-1 split doubles the share count without anyone buying anything, so every observation is multiplied by the ratio of all splits that happened after it was filed. The split list is hand-verified, not scraped. Spin-offs that reset the share count are treated as a new start. Where a year-over-year move still looks like an unrecorded split we flag the company for review rather than publish it.
For some years before 2009, when filings were plain text, the only share count we could read reliably is the fiscal-year average instead of the count on a given day. Where we had to use the average, the company page says so.
The leaderboard ranks the 64 companies we track, not every listed company. A company appears once it has retired at least 10% of its peak share count. Companies that issue more shares than they retire do not appear. The list is built from the companies we follow at Cannibal Stocks and grows every week. Know a cannibal we are missing? Write to contact@buybackradar.com.
We do not rank by price, returns or valuation, and we do not give investment advice. The one stock price on the site is the AutoZone example on the home page: year-end closing prices, not adjusted for dividends, which AutoZone does not pay. The rankings are mechanical and are never for sale. No company has paid to be on this site, and none can pay to be moved.
Every Monday the pipeline rereads the latest filings of every company and rebuilds the site. Last build: 2026-10-16, 57 companies on the list.
The full leaderboard is available as CSV and JSON, every company series as its own CSV from its page. Licence CC BY 4.0: use it, cite it, credit Buyback Radar with a link.