Cord-Cutting as an investment thesis

Cord-cutters are finally having a measurable impact on subscriber numbers. There’s even a whole subreddit with 86,000 subscribers dedicated to cord-cutting.

As these numbers have worked their way into the market, we saw some interesting movements earlier this month. On August 4, Netflix had a massive positive day. The following day, all the traditional media companies fell.

Since July 30, Netflix is the only winner in this group. Viacom, which owns HBO, has actually been the biggest loser despite its launch of HBO Now, which is a service specifically targeted at cord-cutters.

Lest you think this is a short-term trend, take a look at the performance of these companies year-to-date.

The market has already started taking this trend into account. Days To Cover, a measure of how much investors are betting a stock will fall (relative to its liquidity) is higher for all of these media companies.

Before you get too excited, let’s take a step back and look at some revenue metrics. Even though stock market performance has been much better for Netflix compared to traditional media, note that revenues for Netflix are still substantially lower.

Despite lower revenues, the market is clearly pricing in growth potential into Netflix. Netflix has a larger market cap than CBS and Viacom.

Now that the cord-cutting trend is manifesting itself in the markets, how will traditional content producers and distributors respond?