Father’s Day greetings! Another week, another Fab Five gain. $255 billion this week, with each stock participating. For 2023, the group has gained more than $2.9 trillion dollars. If this figure holds, it will eclipse both 2020 and 2021. While some continue to think we are in the middle of an AI-driven bubble, we think that there is real sales growth, especially for Microsoft and Google, occurring in 2023 from AI.

The Telco Top Five also continued their winning ways (except for T-Mobile, which was flat for the week). Comcast continues to increase its lead in the sector, now worth $15 billion more than T-Mobile. Verizon is also showing signs of life, perhaps as a result of this recent Wall Street Journal article indicating that any incoming CFO candidate would need to take the reins of the CEO as well (hard to read too much into this, except to signal that the Board is going to look to retire Hans Vestberg soon after the new CFO gets settled in).

Another big news item this week was Dish Networks’ announcement that they had 5G services available across 240 million POPs. An excellent Fierce Wireless article on the current state of their deployment, as well as a take on their ability to meet their next FCC deadline (2025) is here. Even with recent movement in the stock, Dish’s equity value is still down 54% in 2023 and 61% over the last 12 months.

Finally, our friends at Recon Analytics posted a blog post on the Ten Happiest and Ten Unhappiest counties in the United States for broadband. It’s a sizeable sample, so worth a look here.

File is below. More to come on 2Q earnings based on recent conferences in next Sunday’s Brief.