Market strength continued this week (Fab Five +$183 billion, Telco Top Five +$30 billion). The only stock that lost value of the ten that we track was Microsoft (-$14 billion on a total market cap of $3,867 billion or just under 0.4%). Valuations are getting rich but there is a lot of AI-related growth. Buyer beware.
We received a lot of new economic news this week (CPI, PPI, jobless claims, retail spending, some earnings news). The net impact of all of that to the Atlanta Fed’s GDP estimate was… no change. They are still predicting a 2.5% growth rate for the third quarter (here). We think that’s good news considering the volatility created by changing tariff policy.
On the BEAD award front, here’s the latest list of recommended awards courtesy of Telecompetitor (article here):
Roughly 3/4s of Louisiana’s BEAD funding is going to a consirtium madeup of REV, Swyft, and T-Mobile (see original announcement here) – $5,500+ per home passed. The two FTTH companies are big winners, but T-Mobile gets very cost effective backhaul out of the deal (a critical component to their rural expansion strategy).
Not to be outflanked, but Virginia also released their revised awards as well. Here is the winners list from Telecompetitor (article here):
Both of these results appear to show big wins for Comcast – roughly 31,000 additional homes passed. To put this in context, however, Comcast deployed slightly less than 1.3 million new residential and business passings over the last 12 months (2Q 2024 to 2Q 2025). Every bit helps, but it shows just how many additional ROI-approved passings Comcast can address.
We are told that many more states will be annoucing awards over the next 2-3 weeks. We will track through the Brief as they come in. File is below (we will update all stats by the next interim Brief).