Dislocation

Dislocation

Charter's stock fell 70.6% from a $427.25 close on 16 May 2025 to a $125.54 trough on 22 June 2026, and sits at $129.22. This is a genuine dislocation, not drift: two earnings days did most of the damage — Q2 2025 (−18.5%) and Q1 2026 (−25.5%) — around a grind of broadband-subscriber-loss disappointments. Traded volume ran to 3.9x its pre-peak median. Forward cash-flow and earnings estimates fell in single digits while the equity lost seventy percent.

The drawdown, quantified

Source: derived from the daily price feed; figures match fit_features.capitulation_gauge.drawdown exactly (peak $427.25, trough $125.54, depth −70.6%, 402 days peak-to-trough).

The fall took 402 days and moved in stages rather than one shock. From the 16 May 2025 peak the stock first drifted to $380 by 24 July — down 11% over ten weeks on ordinary volume, no dated event attached. It then dropped in two large earnings-day legs, with a persistent downward grind and one relief bounce in between, before capitulating into the June 2026 trough.

Source: month-end closes from the daily price feed, as reported. The 16 May 2025 intramonth peak ($427.25) and 22 June 2026 intramonth trough ($125.54) sit inside the May-2025 and June-2026 points respectively.

The trigger — two dated event legs

The framework distinguishes the event moment from preceding drift. Charter's slide has both, and separating them matters: the first 11% off the peak carried no identifiable catalyst and normal volume, so it is drift, not the moment. The two capitulation-scale days were both earnings releases.

Source: one-day moves and volume multiples derived from the daily price feed (median = 1.11M shares/day over the 180 days before the peak); event labels from the earnings-call transcripts and dated news releases [1].

Leg one — 25 July 2025 (−18.5%, 8.7x volume). On its Q2 2025 call Charter reported Internet customer losses of 117,000 — an improvement from 149,000 a year earlier — while second-quarter adjusted EBITDA grew just 0.5% [2]. Headline subscriber losses were not the shock; the market repriced on decelerating financials and a competitive environment management called unchanged. The stock fell from $380.00 to $309.75 in a session on volume 8.7 times the pre-peak median.

Leg two — 24 April 2026 (−25.5%, 11.9x volume), extended by −8.4% on 29 April. On the Q1 2026 call Charter reported the loss of 120,000 Internet customers, citing expanded fixed-wireless competition, higher mobile substitution, and ongoing fiber overlap [3]. Adjusted EBITDA declined 2.2% year-over-year, 1.8% excluding Cox transition costs [4]. This was the single largest day of the drawdown and, at $241.78 to $180.13, erased a quarter of the equity in one session.

The competitive mechanism behind both legs is stated plainly in the company's own risk disclosure: residential Internet "faces competition across our footprint from fiber-to-the-home ('FTTH'), fixed wireless broadband, Internet delivered via satellite and DSL services" [5]. The peak itself coincided with the 16 May 2025 announcement of Charter's $34.5 billion combination with Cox Communications [6] — the stock's high-water mark, from which it has fallen since. The two intervening quarters (Q3 2025, Q4 2025) produced no fresh capitulation: Q3 nudged up 1.3% and Q4 rose 7.6% as broadband losses came in smaller than feared. The damage concentrated in two earnings days.

The fear gauge

Source: 20-day-average multiple of 3.88x is fit_features.capitulation_gauge.volume_spike (max 20-day average volume in the peak-to-trough leg ÷ median daily volume over the 180 days before the peak); single-day multiples derived from the daily price feed against the same 1.11M-share median.

The measured volume spike is 3.88x on the profile's smoothed definition — the peak 20-day average traded volume within the fall against the pre-peak median. That is a real spike, though moderate on a 20-day basis. The emotion is clearer at the daily level: the two event legs printed 8.7x and 11.9x median volume, and the heaviest single day of the entire episode was 18 June 2026 at 16.1x median (17.9M shares), four sessions before the $125.54 trough. Peak traded volume landed at the bottom of the fall, not the start — the signature of forced, emotion-driven selling exhausting itself rather than orderly repricing. Consistent with that, the trough was followed within days by a ~9% bounce on a 26 June 2026 report of mobile-partnership talks with SpaceX [7].

Who was selling

The evidence on seller composition is thin, and the largest gap is structural: official reported short-interest data for CHTR was unavailable across every field in the run's short-interest feed (reported short interest, borrow pressure, and public net-short disclosures all returned zero rows), so short-interest level and change cannot be quantified here. This is a data gap, not a finding of low short interest.

What the corpus does support points the other way from informed selling. Charter itself was a persistent buyer through the fall: in Q1 2026 alone it repurchased 4.3 million shares for $963 million at an average price of $225 [8], roughly 74% above today's $129.22 — the company deploying cash into its own equity well above the current price. Two structural overhangs also sit on the register rather than active informed selling: the pending Cox combination, which will issue the equivalent of just over 46 million Charter shares to Cox Enterprises, and the Liberty Broadband transaction, which nets out to a smaller share reduction; together these move the as-converted share count to roughly 179 million at close [9]. Those are supply-and-structure facts, not evidence of holders who know something the tape does not. The volume-at-the-bottom pattern above is the clearest available read on who was selling: anchored holders capitulating into the trough.

Estimates versus price timing

The framework's signature is a price fall that outruns the estimate cut. Over the window where consensus revision history is available — the 180 days into 22 July 2026 — that is exactly the shape.

Source: consensus FY2027 normalized-EPS and revenue revision points from data/sp/estimates.json (momentum series, 180-day / 90-day / 30-day / current as-of dates); CHTR close on or before each as-of date from the daily price feed.

Between 23 January and 22 July 2026 the FY2027 EPS estimate moved from $47.4 to $44.5 — a 6% cut, essentially all of it after the 24 April earnings day — and the FY2027 revenue estimate slipped 3%, from $55.3 billion to $53.7 billion. Over the same span the stock fell 33%, from $191.69 to $129.22. The equity repriced roughly five times as hard as the near-term numbers. Extending the lens, consensus free-cash-flow estimates did not fall at all across the forward horizon: they rise from $4.9 billion (FY2026) to $6.2 billion (FY2027) to $7.3 billion (FY2028), derived from fit_features.consensus_forward_yield. Management's own framing on the Q1 2026 call put a 2028 free-cash-flow yield of over 25% against the current price on declining capex [10]. Consensus forward FCF yield on the current $17.8 billion market cap computes to 28% for FY2025 rising to 47% for FY2029 (fit_features.consensus_forward_yield). The sell side has not repriced the cash flows; the buy side has repriced the equity.

The one caveat on this section: the consensus revision history in the feed reaches back only 180 days, so the estimate path across the first, larger leg of the drawdown (May 2025 through January 2026) is not directly measured here. The direction is unambiguous for the measured window and consistent with the forward-FCF levels, which never fell.

Bottom line

There is a real dislocation. The stock is down 70.6% from its May 2025 peak, the fall is dated to two identifiable earnings-day event legs rather than a smooth slide, traded volume spiked and peaked at the bottom, and forward cash-flow and earnings estimates fell in single digits — or not at all — while the equity lost seventy percent. Whether that gap reflects temporary impairment or permanent damage to broadband economics is not settled here; that question belongs to the Damage Math trial. What this tab establishes is that the price moved far more than the near-term numbers did, on fear that concentrated into two dated events and one capitulation.