Interestingly, this week’s activity for the Fab Five and Telco Top Five is driven by one stock within each group. Apple’s decline represented 77% of the total Fab Five weekly loss, and Charter represented 61% of the Telco Top Five decline.
Charter’s loss is particularly interesting because it only comprises 7% of the total Telco Top Five market capitalization. In case you were busy with quarter end/ year end activities, they held an investor day (transcript and webcast here) that featured an additional $5.5 billion in capital needs. This is small compared to Charter’s total capital spending, and the resulting $100/ home passed of additional capital is a mere fraction of a fiber provider’s capital budget. We are going to have a full analysis of their presentation in the December 31 Sunday Brief.
With this week’s declines, Charter has now halved their beginning of year market capitalization (down 53.2%). They join other cable providers Cable One (down 60.3%) and Altice (down 76.5%) in the “half off” club. Comcast and Frontier are also down, but not as much. AT&T is actually flat if you exclude the steep declines in WarnerMedia Discovery (who announced additional content write offs this week).
We will be posting the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max availability charts tomorrow morning, and will have an abbreviated market capitalization summary next Saturday. File is below.
