What Happened?
Shares of local television broadcasting and media company Gray Television (NYSE: GTN) jumped 17.4% in the afternoon session after the company reported fourth-quarter 2025 financial results that surpassed Wall Street's expectations on key metrics.
Gray Television posted revenue of $792 million and a GAAP loss of $0.24 per share. While sales declined by 24.2% year on year, both the top- and bottom-line figures were better than analysts had anticipated. Specifically, the reported loss per share was a significant improvement over the consensus estimate of a $0.33 loss. Furthermore, the company's adjusted EBITDA, a key measure of profitability, came in at $179 million, comfortably exceeding the expected $159.1 million. The market reacted positively to the company's ability to outperform profitability forecasts despite the sharp drop in revenue.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
Gray Television’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 33 moves greater than 5% over the last year. But moves this big are rare even for Gray Television and indicate this news significantly impacted the market’s perception of the business.
The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 7 months ago when the stock gained 19.4% on the news that multiple analysts raised their price targets on the stock, citing benefits from recent acquisitions and improvements to the company's balance sheet. The positive sentiment from Wall Street came from at least two firms. Benchmark raised its price target significantly to $9.00 from $7.00, maintaining a Buy rating. The firm's analyst noted that Gray's recent refinancing has 'completely revitalized' its balance sheet and that recent acquisitions were 'massively accretive and deleveraging.' Similarly, Wells Fargo increased its price target to $5.00 from $4.50, citing future benefits from deleveraging and free cash flow accretion tied to the company's mergers and acquisitions strategy. These upgrades followed Gray's announcement on August 8th that it would acquire television stations in ten markets from Allen Media Group.
Gray Television is up 22.5% since the beginning of the year, and at $5.88 per share, it is trading close to its 52-week high of $6.24 from August 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Gray Television’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $323.91.
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