Barron's Streetwise · Oct 9, 2026 · 34m · 23m saved
With Paulina McPadden, co-manager of the Baillie Gifford International Concentrated Growth Strategy
Cable stocks are now the cheapest group in the S&P 500, and Barron's columnist Jack Hough says that is not the buy signal it looks like.
Streaming already killed cable once, and cable barely noticed because broadband carried the business anyway. This time telecom carriers have finished building out 5G and are pointing their free cash flow straight at fiber, which steals share from cable in a way broadband never had to compete against before.
"When I wrote about them recently, forbearance, Comcast was down 60% over the past five years. And Charter, that one's a cable pure play, that was down 84%."
Hough, on Barron's Streetwise, also walks through what a "persistent agent" is and why Wall Street has gotten spooked about it. Then Paulina McPadden, who co-manages Baillie Gifford's International Concentrated Growth Strategy, a 20-to-30-stock global fund, joins to make the case for TSMC, Hermes and Shopify.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 34 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Cable stocks are the cheapest group in the S&P 500, but Hough says this "second death" is different from cord-cutting
Fiber has only 22% market share against cable's 56%, but fiber coverage is headed to 90% of households by 2030
A "persistent agent" is not a chatbot — it picks tools and sub-tasks toward a goal rather than predicting the next word, and keeps working after you log off
Barclays says hosting a persistent-agent user costs about $4 a month, 10 times a chatbot user, and estimates $10 trillion in stock-market value is at stake
McPadden won't buy young companies for her concentrated fund because an early-stage company hasn't yet proven competitive advantage
"I love a monopoly," she said of TSMC: its scale in advanced chipmaking is her top pick despite AI capex worries
She won't call an AI bubble — citing economist Carlota Perez's research that past overinvestment, as in fiber during the dot-com era, laid the foundation for the next wave of growth
Shopify's product data "Catalog" doubles the conversion rate of AI-driven shopping searches, she said, versus agentic commerce without it
1. Cable's Second Death
Hough says cable stocks have become the cheapest group in the S&P 500 — and that streaming-era history is a poor guide to what happens next.
Cable and cable-adjacent stocks now carry the lowest price-to-earnings ratios in the index
"When I wrote about them recently, forbearance, Comcast was down 60% over the past five years. And Charter, that one's a cable pure play, that was down 84%." — Jack Hough
"And Charter was three times forward earnings projections, three times, and Comcast was six times. They were the lowest and sixth lowest PEs in the S&P 500." — Jack Hough
He contrasts this with the "first death," when streaming came for pay TV. Cord-cutting didn't hurt cable much because cable companies simply raised broadband prices on customers who no longer paid for TV — broadband was already laid and cost nothing extra to sell.
This time telecom, not streaming, is the threat, because carriers have finished their 5G build-outs and are redirecting free cash flow into fiber
Fiber is useful to telecom both for cellular backhaul — the link that carries traffic from a cell tower back to the core network — and for selling home broadband to existing wireless subscribers, and bundling the two lowers subscriber churn on both sides.
"The thing to know about fiber broadband is, it still only has a 22% market share, that compares with 56% for cable." — Jack Hough
Fiber availability has reached 65% of households and is expected to pass 90% by 2030, Hough said. Fixed wireless broadband has already taken 14% share and Starlink's satellite service has 4%, mostly in rural markets.
As a cautionary parallel, Hough noted that Micron was the cheapest S&P 500 stock by earnings back in April, for a different reason than cable looks cheap now — its earnings were growing so fast the stock couldn't keep up.
"Since we spoke about Micron, let's see, that was this past April. The episode is called The Cheapest Stocks in America. And since then, Micron is up 144%. That is not normal." — Jack Hough
