Why I’m pissed I didn’t short AT&T’s Stock
Entrepreneurs love money. Its why we hustle so hard and sacrifice so much. And truthfully I am no different. Which is why I am so pissed that I missed one of the easiest wins in a while. I imagine this is how everyone who didn’t sell Bitcoin in December 2017 feels…. oh well.
Let me take a small step back, my company, Apptopia, has the ability to accurately estimate downloads, revenue and usage for every mobile app in the world. As you can imagine the line between offline activity and online (i.e. mobile) activity is becoming increasingly thin, if present at all. So when you are looking at things like “How much pizza do people order from Papa John’s?”, the mobile app activity becomes a hugely powerful indicator for this:
But we aren’t here to talk about pizza, we are here to talk about DirectTV Now (and hence AT&T). A lot of major telecom / media companies are banking major growth KPIs on streaming services and various different cord-cutting options. AT&T and Dish Network are two prime examples of this.
Now lets get to the meat - if you look at AT&Ts core streaming app, DirecTV Now, they are hemorrhaging active users (i.e. subscribers) over the last two quarters:
Apparently I’ve been so busy trying to sell our data that I forgot to actually take a moment and really look at it. Our data shows a clear drop of ~510,000 active users / subscribers!
As it turns out yesterday when AT&T had their earnings call, they missed earnings and their stock dropped 5% (the most in over 3 months):
The primary cause of the plunge and missed earnings was due to a major slide in subscribers (267k lost in the last quarter, and 626k total lost over the last two quarters).
Had you been paying attention to our data, this wouldn’t have been a surprise (and you might be a little bit richer) to you.
