Investors, perhaps seeing some buying opportunities after a morning panic sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 1,000 points at the open, began slowly crawling back, as the overall market reduced its slide to about 250 points by mid-day.
Cable stocks, which were hit hard along with every other market sector in the morning, began to see some relief, with most stocks gaining back at least some of their losses of earlier in the day.
Pending merger partners Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable, which had been down as much as 7.1% and 4.3% respectively, during the day, entered positive territory by noon. TWC was up 1% ($1.41) to $185.00 per share and Charter rose 0.3% (56 cents) to $177.97 each. Other distribution stocks slowly began to reverse the downward spiral. Cablevision, down 9.4% earlier in the session, finished the first half of the day down 41 cents each (1.7%) to $23.33 each and Comcast, down as much as 4% earlier in the day, was down 1.6% (92 cents) by mid-day. Cable One, which had been unchanged earlier, was down the most – 2.8%, or $11.77 each, to $407.98 by noon time.
Programming stocks also seemed to start on the path to a slow recovery. CBS was up 7 cents per share (0.2%) by mid-day to $45.16 each; Discovery Communications, down about 5.2% earlier in the morning slowed its decline to 3.1% by noon. Disney, down 7% earlier was down just 1% by mid-day, with 21st Century Fox down 2.5%, Viacom down 1%, Time Warner Inc. down 1.4% and Netflix, which opened down about 15%, was down less than 1% (35 cents each) by noontime to $103.67 per share.
It has been a volatile past few days for the market – it fell more than 300 points Thursday and more than 535 points on Friday. Cable stocks, which have been on a rollercoaster ride for weeks, were down between 11% and 3.5% since Aug. 17
