As we indicated in some social media posts on Friday, the market capitalization picture for the Telco Top Five (and Google in the Fab Five) was better than the market as a whole. In fact, over the last two weeks, each stock in the Telco Top Five gained value. AT&T (adjusted for the WarnerMedia spin) and T-Mobile are still positive for 2022. Charter and Comcast have a ways to go to make up for this year’s “what could be” losses, and Verizon… well, let’s just say that there’s a lack of conviction about the stock.

One of the interesting notes we had on the Fab Five is that the “leaders” for the last two weeks have been Google and Facebook, typically associated with ad-driven stocks. Google also held their I/O conference last week (which we will cover in the next Brief) but we found that trend to be particularly interesting. If we were on the precipice of a steep recession, these stocks would tend to lead the way (the counter to this is that FB is already down 41% this year so there’s nowhere left to go).

Take a look, and welcome any comments to jim@pattersonadvice.com. Downloadable file is below.