Shares of AT&T Inc. recorded their best weekly performance since 2000 after the telecommunications company offered some reassurance to Wall Street with its latest earnings report.
AT&T’s stock
T,
+2.15%
had been in Wall Street’s “penalty box” recently, a Cowen & Co. analyst wrote ahead of the company’s Thursday earnings report, and the stock suffered its largest quarterly drop in 20 years during the third quarter. But investors — and at least one Wall Street analyst — seem to be warming to the stock more in the wake of AT&T’s most recent report, which not only showed continued subscriber traction, but also offered a bit more optimism around the company’s cash-flow picture.
Shares ended the week up 14.1% to record their largest weekly percentage gain since a March 2020 period when they rose more than 28%, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
“We are upgrading AT&T following more than 15 years of underperformance now that it has demonstrated an ability to focus on core business as opposed to acquisitions of loosely related companies at market high valuations,” Truist Securities analyst Greg Miller wrote Friday as he lifted his rating to buy from hold and kept his $21 price target steady.
AT&T’s stock has lagged Verizon’s as well as the S&P 500 over a 15-year period.
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Miller said that while AT&T investors have been “disappointed” in the past over what turned out to be false starts of sorts around business improvements, he thinks things could be different now, since AT&T’s “focus has returned to its core competency of basic connectivity…
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