Hans's Chart Room: No Moat Is Permanent. Telecom Found Out Friday.

Weekend Chart Room teaser · Sunday, October 11, 2026

Note From Hans

Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write this year: the scariest chart of the week belonged to the phone company. On Friday, T-Mobile fell 13.3%, AT&T 9.8% and Verizon 8.8%, all in one session, after SpaceX agreed to buy a block of wireless spectrum that it says will let Starlink Mobile become a major U.S. carrier. The deal still needs FCC approval. The market didn’t wait for it.

These are the stocks people own because nothing ever happens to them. Fat dividend, sleepy chart, a moat built out of spectrum licenses and towers that nobody was supposed to be able to copy. I’ve been talking about the Ultimate Age of Disruption for a year and a half now, and Friday is what it looks like in real time. Once a moat gets questioned, nobody can tell you what the business is worth in ten years, and the market reprices that whole future in an afternoon. A 13% day in a telecom stock is the market writing down what that company is worth in 2036.

The index barely noticed. The S&P gained 1.15% for the week to 7,811.54, seven points shy of Tuesday’s record close. The 10-year touched 5.36% on Wednesday, its highest since 2002, then a strong auction took the pressure off and it finished the week at 5.24%, the first week in a while that yields didn’t grind higher. The VIX closed at 14.84.

Under the hood, Thursday rattled the AI trade. A report that OpenAI’s revenue run rate was around $50 billion, roughly $20 billion below what investors expected, knocked Micron down 4.8% and Nvidia about 3% that day. By Friday, follow-up reports said the gap came down to how OpenAI counts cloud-partner revenue, and that it expects to hit $70 billion or more by year-end. The market sold first and read the footnotes second.

And the money moved instead of leaving. Nine of eleven sectors finished higher, led by utilities (+3.97%), energy and staples (+3.60% each) and health care (+2.79%), while technology finished dead last (−0.52%). The equal-weight S&P beat the cap-weighted index, 1.58% to 1.15%. Right now the market is paying up for visibility. Friday showed you what happens the moment visibility gets questioned.

This week the calendar gets loud: the big banks Tuesday and Wednesday, CPI Wednesday, PPI and retail sales Thursday, Taiwan Semi Thursday morning, and monthly options expiration Friday. Options are pricing a 1.2% move in the S&P for the week, roughly 7,720 to 7,900.

T-Mobile’s Worst Day Since 2013

T-Mobile fell 13.27% Friday to 148.58 on more than three times its normal volume. One candle took out the 160.81 low from late September and the 164.71 low from June, and RSI(14) is down to 29, officially oversold.

The catalyst: SpaceX agreed Thursday night to buy a block of 800 MHz wireless spectrum that, in its own words, “will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US.” Here’s the irony. T-Mobile is the carrier that partnered with Starlink for satellite texting. Your partner just told the world it wants to be your competitor.

Hans’s take: Oversold doesn’t mean cheap when the question is what the business is worth in ten years. I wouldn’t try to catch this one until the market finishes repricing the moat.

The 2026 Scoreboard

Step back from the week and here’s how 2026 has scored so far. Energy (XLE, +48.45%) and broad commodities (PDBC, +48.38%) are running away with the year, with oil services (OIH) up 36.48%. Emerging markets (EEM, +22.73%) and the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ, +22.71%) are next. The S&P is up 14.11% and small caps 14.09%. Developed international (EFA) is up 9.38%. At the bottom: gold (−3.00%) and silver (−13.86%).

If you’d told me in January that energy stocks would be beating the Nasdaq 100 by 25 points in October, with gold down on the year, I’d have asked what you were drinking.

Hans’s take: This year has paid for things that get burned, not things that get stored. The metals still haven’t joined the party.

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Full Chart Room (all charts): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MxP5Dp60FkwtYlLoInw2vaSb3jlqvsfb/view

Trade smart, stay hedged.

Hans Albrecht · Options With Hans

This material is for educational and informational purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Past performance does not guarantee future results.