Charter Communications has dropped 28% in a month to $110.67, short sellers have rebuilt positions over the week, and the options market is the most bullish it has been all year, creating one of the more contradictory setups in the cable sector right now.
Short interest climbed 7.8% over the past week to just under 12% of the free float, reversing a sharp collapse in September that had taken SI from roughly 20% at the start of the month to below 12% around September 10. That reset looks significant: from August into early September, around 20 million shares were sold short. Over just a few days in mid-September, that figure dropped by nearly 5 million shares. The partial rebuild since then suggests some of those who covered are returning. Despite the renewed interest, the borrow market remains far from stressed. Cost to borrow is running below 0.5%, down 11% on the week, and availability at 344% means there are more than three shares available to lend for every one already borrowed. This is an easy borrow, and the ORTEX short score of 60 is middling rather than extreme, ranking in just the 13th percentile for short pressure across the universe.
Options tell the opposite story. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.46, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.51. That is the most call-heavy options skew of the past year. After a month in which the stock shed more than a quarter of its value, options traders are not reaching for downside protection. They are buying calls. Whether that reflects genuine recovery conviction or simply cheap premium after a brutal drawdown is the question worth sitting with, but the signal is unambiguous: relative to recent norms, this is one of the more bullish options setups Charter has shown in 2026.
The Street has turned more cautious in measured steps. Morgan Stanley reinstated coverage on September 14 with an Equal-Weight rating at $150, then lowered that target to $140 just two weeks later, tracking the stock down. Wolfe Research downgraded to Underperform on the same day as the Morgan Stanley reinstatement, setting a $118 target that is now only 7% below where the stock trades. Wells Fargo sits at $101 Underweight, one of the lowest targets on the board. The bull case is more generous: Citigroup holds a Buy with a $180 target, and the consensus mean of $178 implies roughly 60% upside from current levels. That gap between the consensus target and the current price is wide enough to reflect genuine disagreement about the trajectory rather than simple model drift. EPS momentum scores are strong in the 30-day window, ranking in the 84th percentile, but the valuation tells a recovery story: a PE of 2.5x and an EV/EBITDA of 4.4x, with EV/EBITDA down 0.84 turns over the past month as the stock has de-rated sharply.
The most structurally important development for Charter right now sits on the 13D register, not in the short-lending market. Cox Enterprises filed a fresh Schedule 13D on August 25, disclosing a 27.9% stake of 46.2 million shares, the direct consequence of the Cox acquisition announced earlier in the year. Advance/Newhouse Partnership, a longtime Charter stakeholder, filed a 13D/A on August 20 showing its stake rose from 12.3% to 14.4%, reaching 18.6 million shares. Liberty Broadband, which had held roughly 32.4% of the class, filed a 13D/A on August 21 with its stake size no longer disclosed, consistent with the share exchange mechanics of the Cox deal. The result is a shareholder register that has been fundamentally restructured: Cox is now the largest disclosed 13D filer at just under 28%, Advance/Newhouse follows, and Liberty Broadband's position is in flux. Dodge and Cox, the top institutional holder with 9.8% and 15 million shares, added around 405,000 shares as of June 30. AQR and Millennium each added over 1.4 million shares in Q2, suggesting some active managers were building positions even as the stock fell. Stakes are as last disclosed and any holder can fall below 5% without filing again. That caveat is worth holding in mind for any position that has not been updated since August.
Retail attention, measured by Wikipedia page views against Charter's own 90-day history, shows a z-score of 1.27 as of September 22, above average but not extreme. The next earnings print is October 30, 30 days away. The key question into that date is whether the broadband subscriber loss trajectory, 172,000 net losses in Q2 with residential ARPU down 1.7%, is stabilising or widening, and how the market prices the Cox integration costs against the EBITDA recovery timeline management has laid out.
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