Aren’t all those cord cutters supposed to be a wrecking ball for companies selling old world cable subscription services? Maybe not. After all, cord cutting requires a lot more effort than many consumers are willing to make for the savings. Also, you have to get your Internet connection from somewhere. Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is still adding customers, and it boosted its dividend and stock buyback authorization to boot.

Comcast was trading higher after earnings on Wednesday. Merrill Lynch did not just reiterate its Buy rating on Comcast. The firm calls Comcast its Top Pick for 2016, and it has a whopping $84.00 price objective, the highest of all official analyst price targets on Wall Street.

Merrill Lynch’s Jessica Reif Cohen pointed out that Comcast had healthy results across all business lines. In particular, it had impressive subscriber metrics as video has been aided by its X1 roll-out.

Wednesday’s research report, which again has the highest price target of all analysts, said:

Comcast continues to execute superbly and clearly remains the best-in-class operator across all of its businesses, in our view. Comcast announced its capital return program for 2016, including $5 billion in planned share repurchases and a 10% dividend increase to $1.10.

Comcast’s consolidated revenue was up 8.5% to $19.245 billion. Outside of $169 million in revenue from USJ (51% interest acquired November 2015) revenue growth was 7.6%. Its consolidated operating cash flow rose 6.7% to $6.272 billion. Free cash flow was down over 6% to $1.59 billion, but this would have been better if you consider that some of the spending was for an Orlando land purchase and USJ capital spending.

Comcast’s earnings release showed that the company had 27.7 million customer relationships, with 9.22 million having two products and 10.1 million triple product customers.

Adjusted earnings was up 5.2% to $0.81 per share, which was actually a penny shy of the Thomson/First Call estimate of $0.82 per share. Comcast reported 688,000 net subscriber adds across its platforms, and Merrill Lynch pointed out that this was 40,000 boxes per day under the X1 roll-out. Video subscriber net adds were 89,000 and HSD net additions were 460,000. VoIP added 139,000 subs. Programming expenses were up 4.2% and NBC/Universal advertising was strong.

As far as why Comcast is a top pick for 2016:

• Best-in-class cable operations
• Solid execution at NBCU with further upside anticipated
• Very strong management team
• An extremely attractive valuation

Merrill Lynch’s $84 price objective is based on 8.5 times the expected 2016 cable EBITDA and 10.9 times for NBCU, for a blended target multiple of 9.2. The current valuation for cable is a substantial discount to the historical average. Comcast is trading in line with peers, but Merrill Lynch believes that it deserves a premium.

Comcast shares were last seen trading up 2.2% at $55.80 in strong volume. The consensus analyst price target is only $69.59, and the 52-week trading range is $50.00 to $64.99.

If Merrill Lynch is right, this and the new yield being closer to 2% would imply upside of just over 50%. The consensus target would still imply more than 25% upside on a total return basis.

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