I realize I’m jumping around.  But if you know TPL, you know that it is a trust that was designed to self liquidate.  The trust generally (not always!) applies marginal free cash flow to the repurchase of shares.

As shown above, the outstanding float of shares has decreased by over 50% since 1992.  On average, the trust repurchases 0.72% of itself every quarter.  This may seem like a large number but you have to consider that the 0.72% average is applied to an ever shrinking base.

As we can see by the trend of the orange line (% shares repurchased/quarter), recent repurchases are lower than average.  Ardent followers of TPL will know that this is due to the shares simply getting more expensive.  And when I say expensive, I mean expensive outright and as a % of top line revenue and net income (more on that another day).