HSBC Holdings Plc rose the most since April after it announced a $2.5 billion stock buyback for this year and said it plans more share repurchases while keeping its dividend at the current level for the foreseeable future.
Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver is returning half the equity freed up from selling the bank’s Brazil unit, with the rest boosting the firm’s capital ratio to 12.8 percent. That outweighed concerns about profitability, as pretax earnings fell 45 percent to $3.61 billion from a year earlier, and the bank removed a target of surpassing a 10 percent return on equity by the end of next year.
