Singapore companies are buying back their shares at a pace we have not seen in years. Over the first five months of 2026, 57 primary-listed companies repurchased S$1.26 billion of their own shares on the open market. That is up from around S$930 million in the same period of 2025, and S$505 million the year before that. The big names led the way. Singtel (SGX: Z74), OCBC (SGX: O39) and Keppel (SGX: BN4) topped the table, each spending tens or hundreds of millions. Singtel alone bought back close to S$497 million of stock. That is a big number, and big numbers get the attention. But further down the list sit three much smaller companies. Their buybacks run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of millions. That is the part worth pausing on. For a small company, a buyback is not a capital management exercise dressed up for the annual report. It is a...