Altice USA shares fell for the third straight trading day on Monday, slipping nearly 6% after analysts at Credit Suisse and Raymond James downgraded the stock.

Altice USA shares closed Monday at $19.38 each, down 5.8% or $1.20 per share, after reaching another 52-week low of $19.21 per share earlier in the day. Altice USA shares are now down 23.3% since Sept. 23, when CEO Dexter Goei said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that Q3 broadband additions for the company would be negative.

Several analysts have adjusted their estimates on Altice USA since the Goldman conference, and on Monday, Credit Suisse analyst Doug Mitchelson wrote that he was concerned about the company, adding that he was wrong about Altice USA’s broadband competitiveness and according to reports said that he expects the company’s new investment strategy to “take at least several quarters, if not longer, to begin bearing fruit.”

He lowered his rating on the shares to “neutral” from “outperform” and reduced his 12-month price target on the stock to $24 from $46 per share.

Raymond James media analyst Frank Louthan IV also noted Altice USA’s decision to move away from share repurchases -- which he saw as a key component of its valuation -- as a reason for downgrading the stock from “outperform” to “market perform” on Monday.

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Media analysts threw ice-cold water on a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday suggesting that Comcast may buy ViacomCBS and/or Roku. 

"From a regulatory standpoint, ViacomCBS is a non-starter with network/station overlaps, even before considering whether network/content production market share would be an issue," Credit Suisse's Douglas Mitchelson wrote in a note to investors Thursday morning. 

As for Roku, the analyst believes the Silicon Valley streaming company's $56 billion-plus market cap makes acquisition of it cost-prohibitive. 

"Acquiring Roku would be highly dilutive and likely lever Comcast's balance sheet (something that management has been clear it will not do near-to-mid term), in pursuit of a new out-of-market connected TV strategy with unclear longer-term barriers to entry and customer acquisition costs, and which management has already been building internally," Mitchelson said. 

Meanwhile, Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich said Comcast's so-called PlatCo initiative, in which it's working with Walmart and Hisense to make smart TVs powered by a Comcast OS, is in competition with Roku. 

"We believe a Roku acquisition would be duplicative with [Comcast's] own Flex hardware and would add nothing from a content/IP perspective," Ehrlich said in a morning investor report. 

Comcast is reportedly in the process of evaluating bold M&A moves as it tries to bolster the position of Peacock in the ultra-competitive video streaming race. 

In a Thursday research note, Barclays media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar wrote that outside the obvious regulatory obstacles to additional M&A for Comcast, he remains skeptical that Comcast would consider buying ViacomCBS or Roku.

It’s only been a few weeks since Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts and chief financial officer Michael Cavanagh were making the rounds at virtual industry conferences telling analysts and investors that there was no desire for a big deal. So doing a big deal, according to the analyst, would be a blow against Comcast’s credibility. 

Still, Venkateshwar said it was difficult to dismiss Comcast’s M&A intentions, given its deal-making track record. Although a Roku deal could give the company a streaming advantage when coupled with its NBCUniversal and Peacock assets, he believed it would be better to build than buy.  

Given Roku’s $56 billion market cap, Venkateshwar said it would make more sense for Comcast to give out free Flex devices to every household in its Comcast/Sky footprint.

“Comcast also has the choice of spending more money on Peacock and making that a free, ad-supported service, which would make it potentially bigger than the Roku Channel, especially given Comcast’s own footprint,” Venkateshwar added.

Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall noted that Comcast’s past M&A endeavors have resulted in a big dip in its stock price, which should be catalyst enough to discourage any buying spree.  

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In a Thursday report, Cahall wrote Comcast stock dropped about 23% between January 2018 and June 2018, the period it was in a bidding war with Disney for the Fox assets. 

“We think investors have just regained confidence that an uninterrupted buyback period is coming, and this confidence will now be shaken,” Cahall wrote. “Given other Media consolidation (e.g. Discovery/WarnerMedia, Amazon/MGM) we think it will be tough to lay M&A fears to rest short of levering up for a buyback.” 

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Credit Suisse co-head of EMEA investment banking Marisa Drew knew early on that she liked entrepreneurs.

She just didn’t want to be one.

Drew got a taste for investment banking early on through a two-year internship in New York fresh out of the University of Virginia, where she had earned an undergrad degree in finance.

At the end of that internship — which required that she go back to school to get her MBA before she was allowed to return — Drew felt that she hadn’t yet amassed enough life experience. So she began working in the then-nascent field of private equity.

It was there that she met her first Trumps (South African real estate moguls Eddie and Julius, not Donald), and, although she learned a lot, she thought the pace was too slow.

“In banking, you find yourself doing five or six live deals at a time,” Drew said. “Whereas, in private equity, you evaluate a large number of transactions, but you only bid on a small fraction of those deals and you only win a fraction of that. Private equity wasn’t for me.”

From there, Drew moved into the entrepreneurial space, tapped by a former colleague to run a chain of learning centers in the then-new computer education arena. While again learning a lot about running a successful business and being part of a chain that was growing rapidly, she found it had its drawbacks, too.

SEEKING ‘GOOD STRESS’

“Intellectually, I was no longer challenged once the business was up and running,” Drew said. “And I found there is good stress and bad stress. The stress of solely making every decision, and the daily pressure of making decisions that were life and death for the business, was oppressive stress for me. Plus, I really missed the energy and flow of the markets.”

When someone stepped up to buy the business, Drew went back to school, getting her MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and moved on to her next adventure. This time, she found herself back in investment banking, helping to capitalize early- growth companies, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s put her squarely in the middle of telecom and cable.

“Everything came together at that moment,” Drew said. “I just found the perfect job, and honestly, I never looked back.”

Drew engineered financings and deals in the United States, Canada and Latin America for Merrill Lynch and, in 1999, moved to London to help start up its leveraged finance practice. Four years later, in 2003, she was doing the same for Credit Suisse.

She has done several groundbreaking deals, including an exit financing for bankrupt U.K. cable operators NTL and Telewest that contemplated a merger between the two entities before it actually occurred — unprecedented at the time, but commonplace today. Later, Drew also developed a new financing structure for Liberty Global that allowed the cable giant to use fluctuations in its leverage ratio to finance acquisitions.

MALONE’S FAVORITE BANKER

Carving out that new ground won Drew and her team notice. Drew has been called Liberty Global chairman John Malone’s favorite banker in Europe, having done several deals for that company — including its $25.5 billion acquisition of Virgin Media — as well for European telecom giant Altice Group and countless others.

Drew also spends time mentoring women for banking careers and serving as co-chair of the Credit Suisse Diversity Leadership Council and as a trustee of the Credit Suisse Foundation. She is also the founder of the Competitors’ Diversity Forum and a member of the C200, an organization comprised of the top women in business globally.

Despite its reputation as a male-dominated environment, Drew said she believes banking has rewards like few others for women and men. Over the years, she helped build the first cable company in post-Communist Poland and financed the creation of a mobile telephone network in Medellin, Colombia, during the drug wars in that country, providing a communications infrastructure that improved the safety of citizens there.

“How do you put a price on that?” Drew said. “The fact that I feel that I had a hand in building whole industries, I don’t think women should shy away from that opportunity. If I can somehow impart the experience I’ve had or inspire someone to say, ‘This is a career I am thinking hard about and not dismissing it out of hand because on the surface, it seems like a career not suited to women,’ then I feel like I’ve done something to give back for the lucky successes I’ve had.”