UPDATE: Bank of America Lowers Frontier Communications' PT

According to a research report published this morning, Bank of America has lowered Frontier Communications' FTR PT from $4 to $3. In the report, Bank of America commented, "Following 1Q results on Monday morning Frontier underperformed the S&P500 by 7.25%, a move we find challenging to reconcile with our read that there was no outsized fundamental weakness in the results. As such, our hypothesis is that the market is grappling with the much bigger question of how to reconcile the seemingly contradictory twin management goals of maintaining the current, recently lowered dividend while simultaneously streering the balance sheet to the recently reiterated goal of achieving a 2.5x leverage ratio by the latter part of 2014. We are lowering our price objective to $3.00 from $4.00 based on the risk to the dividend that stems from management's commitment to its leverage goal." Bank of America maintains its Underperform rating on Frontier Communications, which closed yesterday at $3.61.