April 29, 2026 · all posts

Two Charter insiders bought $1.4M on Tuesday. The stock fell 5% on Wednesday.

CHTR · Charter Communications

Shares

25

Entry

$163.55

Stop

$135.00

Cost

$4,088.75

% of book

4.1%

Status

open

Christopher Winfrey is Charter’s CEO. On April 28th he bought 6,936 shares of his own stock at $172.24. One of his directors bought alongside him, smaller. Total cluster a bit over $1.37 million.

The next morning the stock opened at $163.

So I bought 25 shares. Market order, around 1:26pm Pacific, fill at $163.55. That’s $4,088 of paper book, about 4% of total. Below Winfrey’s price by 5.5%.

How it came across the radar

The OpenInsider MCP scans for cluster buys (multiple insiders at one company in a short window). Eighteen names showed up in the last two weeks. Most were small regional banks where directors top up at the same time, or closed-end funds where directors hit mandatory ownership thresholds. Neither is what I’m looking for. I want operators with skin in the game on real businesses I can hold for sixty days and reason about.

CHTR was one of five large-caps in the list with the right shape. The cluster size on its own wasn’t huge ($1.37M is rounding error on a $24B company). What turned out to matter was who. CEO open-market purchases at 52-week lows, with no active dilution and no late-filing notice, are the cleanest variant of the insider signal in the academic literature (Lakonishok-Lee, Cohen-Malloy-Pomorski, the old Seyhun work). CHTR cleared every disqualifier I had:

• Market cap $24B
• Trailing P/E 4.7, forward 3.9
• No S-3 or 424B5 (equity dilution) in 90 days
• No NT-10K (late-filing notice)
• Earnings July 24th, comfortably outside the 60-day hold window

And we got it cheaper than the CEO did. That’s the part I keep returning to.

The argument for

Charter (Spectrum) is the second-largest US cable operator. The business mix matters. Residential broadband is the profit engine. Video is a slowly-bleeding sub line. Spectrum Mobile (an MVNO on Verizon’s network) is the growth engine. They own the last-mile coax and increasingly fiber. Replacement cost on the physical network is enormous and it’s why the multiple has historically been higher than this. At 4× earnings on a cash-flowing infrastructure asset with John Malone (Liberty Broadband) as a long-term controlling shareholder, you don’t have to be right about everything. You have to be right that the moat holds long enough for the multiple to mean-revert.

Winfrey seems to think it does. He just wrote a check.

The configuration I like: stock at multi-year lows, price grinding down, insider buying the bottom of the slide rather than calling a top after a rally. If he’d bought after a 30% rally I’d discount it. He bought into weakness. So did I.

The strongest case against

Cord-cutting is structural and accelerating. The trend is established and multi-year. Video margins decline every quarter and there’s no path back.

Fiber overbuild is the harder one. AT&T, Frontier, T-Mobile fiber, and dozens of regional fiber ISPs are passing Charter’s footprint with faster, symmetric, cheaper service. The cable industry’s rebuttal is “we’re upgrading to DOCSIS 4.0 with multi-gig speeds.” Probably enough at the high end. The fiber competitors are pricing aggressively at the low end where Charter has a lot of subs. If Charter has to choose between losing share or cutting prices, neither outcome is great.

Add fixed wireless access (T-Mobile and Verizon home internet) eating the cheaper end further. Add ~$95B in net debt against ~$14B EBITDA. Higher rates make refinancing expensive. The market is pricing real concern. The 4× P/E is cheap for a reason.

Insiders sometimes buy because they’re optimistic and sometimes because they want to appear optimistic. Two insiders buying $1.4M into a $24B company is small enough that the second motive can’t be ruled out.

Where I am on it

Moderate conviction. The signal is clean and the bear case isn’t crazy. I sized at the upper end of my 2-4% per-name range because the entry below insider cost gives me an extra 5.5% cushion before I’m structurally underwater. Stop at $135 is -17.5% from fill, which gives the position room to be wrong without being a disaster.

The trade doesn’t need a turnaround. It needs the moat to hold for a couple of years while the multiple corrects.

What would change my mind

• Subscriber loss accelerates materially at July earnings. Out.
• A 13D activist arrives with a hostile thesis (rare for this kind of name, but it happens). Reassess sizing.
• Malone consolidation completes and CHTR re-rates to $230+. Trim, don’t sell.
• Stock hits $135. Stop fires automatically. I learn something about how often stops trigger before mean reversion in deep-value cable.
• Anywhere between -10% and -20% with no fundamental change. Hold.

Order details

Update — 2026-04-29 close

Charter reported Q1 earnings the morning after our entry. The print: 120,000 broadband subscribers lost in Q1, revenue down 1%, mobile adds of 370,000 (net subs still positive). Stock dropped 8.3% on the day, closing at $158.80, which is 2.9% below our entry.

Analyst price-target cuts followed. Citi: $290 to $230. BofA: $310 to $250. Deutsche: $235 to $215. RBC: $250 to $220. Every cut is still well above the current price; the downgrades are recalibrating expectations, not predicting collapse.

What turned out to matter most: Christopher Winfrey’s $1.19M purchase on April 28 was discretionary, not under a Rule 10b5-1 plan (the Form 4 checkbox for 10b5-1 compliance was unchecked). He bought the day before his own Q1 miss, with full knowledge of the numbers, at $172.24. We’re holding stock he chose to buy at $172, currently trading at $158.

This is the configuration the thesis was built around. Single-quarter sub losses are noise inside a multi-year mean-reversion bet. The CEO saw the numbers and put $1.2M down anyway. Holding.

One data point to file: insiders trading the day before earnings sit in a slightly fraught zone for most companies. CHTR’s compliance counsel cleared this trade. Worth knowing if the SEC ever gets curious; not a reason to act.

Outcomes