Hi Manlobbi,

Thanks for that lengthy reply (I'd forgotten about my post), and these boards! It's often fun to see what just 1 programmer (or a v small team) can achieve* given the right tools and incentive, excellent work! :-)

So if I followed that correctly, and we assume (haha, ass-u-me etc) similar in the future, and no change in valuation (haha again), we might expect something like inflation + divis + 1-2% ? So call it 3% real, +/-. Yeah, I can believe that. In fact that's what I would expect.

I guess I was just surprised by the lack of visible investment required out of earnings, I'm used to thinking of it as roughly; half the earnings go out as divis, and half go to investment which creates the growth. I knew buybacks were large in the US, but didn't realise they were SO big across the market as a whole. I guess it's related to Jim's comments about how the best modern businesses are generally asset light, so perhaps the investment required doesn't show up in the numbers in the way I was thinking of it. I'm not too concerned anyway, so we don't need to beat this whole thing to death.

Cheers,
SA

* I'm often impressed by open source sw, and have followed the stockfish project for several years now. For anyone interested in the amazing strength of modern computer chess (admittedly, the team is rather larger than just 1 person), see:
tcec-chess.com: TCEC Chess (big hw, long time control competition, currently running the top league in their 24th Season, to be followed by a 100 game match between the 2 best engines)
chess.com - Computer chess championship (A newer rival to TCEC)
github.com - Official stockfish (code)
tests.stockfishchess.org: Checking your browser (test rig)