Due to the Easter Holiday, this was a shorter trading week. The Fab Five made up for lost ground over the four trading days, however, as the table shows (+$714 billion for the week). As a group, they made up (exactly) the market cap losses over the last two weeks. Amazon and Apple gained value over that period, while Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta lost value.
In Fab Five news, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had a great article out on Friday that described a new feature in Siri – the ability to handle multiple tasks at once (here). While a small improvement, this shows that Apple committed to parity with AI applications. In addition to iTunes app integration, this could improve the functionality (and value) of Apple’s desktop software as well. It will take a long series of “singles” to vault Siri into a leadership position, but progress is being made.
AT&T introduced their OneConnect converged product pricing this week, and we think it will be successful for movers (unfortunately this pricing only applies to “new wireless and new fiber customers”). Here is the matrix from the AT&T announcement (full details here):
As we will discuss in our next full Brief next week (which is focused on how cable can grow broadband market share), Spectrum has and will continue to have a compelling broadband + wireless bundle (we think the fact that Spectrum Mobile has all taxes and fees included even if broadband does not might warrant some clarification on AT&T’s site). Spectrum’s Unlimited plan also provides a higher QCI data prioritization than QCI9 (which is our assumption based on the wording in AT&T’s offer details). AT&T has made a bold offer which will be backed up by a lot of advertising and should be effective in new fiber markets.
One final macro note – the jobs report was released on Friday (here).
The line most troubling to us is the 661K year-over-year decrease in employed persons. In Table A-8, we see that 53% of that figure comes from government employees. That still leaves a 310K decrease in employment. With certain industries showing gains, we think that some of the remainder is attributable to increases in retirements, but the impacts of tariffs on trade industries (including transportation) cannot be ruled out. The last row showing “people who currently want a job” has grown since the beginning of the year. Bottom line: One month of strong growth is good, and knowing that it’s not dependent on immigration growth helps, but there is still a lot of work to do.
Full file is below. Hope everyone had a terrific Holiday weekend!
