Articles by Rick Munarriz

Technology

3 Dates for Disney Investors to Circle in November

Walt Disney (DIS +0.77%) has a lot on its plate as we head into Thanksgiving later this month. The iconic media stock finds itself trading only marginally higher in 2025. It enters November negotiating with YouTube TV to gets ESPN, ABC, and other of media networks back on the live TV streaming service. Unlike last year -- when Disney put out the year's three highest grossing films worldwide -- it has just one of the nine top draws in 2025. It's still the world's most prolific theme park operator, but its closest rival just reported a big jump for its gated attractions business last week on the strength of a new bar-raising destination. Can a new Disney World experience, encouraging financial results, and a fresh theatrical release get it back on track? Let's take a closer look at some of the dates that Disney investors will want to circle in November. Theme parks may stir up nostalgia, but they are never supposed to be time capsules. The experience needs to evolve to exceed rising price tags and expectations, and that brings us to the official opening of "Zootopia: Better Zoogether" at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida next weekend. Based on Disney's popular Zootopia animated franchise, the animated 3D show has in-theater effects replicating confetti launches, stampedes, and spitting animals. It replaces "It's Tough To Be a Bug," one of the few remaining attractions from when Disney World's fourth theme park opened 27 years ago. There are much bigger changes coming to Disney World's gated attractions in the years to come. However, as the world's most-visited theme park resort starts to gear up for the popular holiday season, it's always good to have something new for guests to experience. Zootopia-related events will serve as bookends this month. The meaty center in this sandwich will be Disney's fresh financial results. There's a lot riding on the fiscal fourth-quarter results that the House of Mouse will be reporting on the morning of Nov. 13. Wall Street pros aren't holding out for much. Analysts are modeling $27.8 billion in revenue, a less than 1% year-over-year increase. The bottom-line outlook isn't better. The $1.03 a share profit that the market is expecting is a 10% decline. A silver lining here is that Disney has come through with double-digit percentage earnings beats in each of the three previous quarters. What was holding Disney back this summer? It fared better on the theatrical front last year with Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. On the theme park front, rival Comcast (CMCSA +1.88%) opened the Epic Universe theme park at its Universal Orlando resort in May -- minutes away from Disney World. Comcast announced financial results on Thursday, turning heads with a 19% increase in revenue for its theme parks business for the first full quarter for Epic Universe operations. Will those gains come at the expense of Disney World's tourist magnets or did an uptick in tourist counts benefit the leader? There are also some big questions to answer with Disney's streaming business. Did Disney+ hold up under the threat of cancellations over the short-lived Jimmy Kimmel suspension? Are subscribers on board with the full-featured ESPN streaming service that launched in August? One thing that happened after the quarter came to a close was subscription prices going up again. Will Disney offer any color on potential churn following the Oct. 21 price hike? Disney is a bellwether of entertainment stocks. In less than two weeks, its own earnings season appearance will be required reading or hearing for all industry investors. A weak year at the multiplex should get a boost in the final few weeks of the year. Zootopia 2 hits theaters on Thanksgiving Eve. Avatar: Fire and Ash will premiere in December, a lock to be the biggest film among this year's theatrical releases. Zootopia 2 should draw well. The original animated feature came out in 2016, one of just four movies to top $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide that year. It's also probably worth mentioning that three of the four biggest movies of 2024 -- from any studio -- happened to be animated sequels. It's the right film at the right time to boost Disney in a year that hasn't gone right as often as investors would like.

Technology

Worried About a Bear Market? 4 Reasons to Buy Coca-Cola Stock Like There's No Tomorrow.

If the market runs dry, you're going to want a liquid investment. And if there's one thing that Coca-Cola (KO +0.51%) knows well, it's liquid. Beyond its namesake soft drinks, Coca-Cola covers a lot of beverage stock categories, including water, coffee, tea, sports drinks, juice, and dairy products. Coca-Cola's flagship beverage is bubbly, and some may argue that the same can be said about today's market. A pullback is inevitable, even if it takes weeks, months, or years to happen. So why should you buy shares of the pop star if you're worried about a bear market? Stay close. I have a list of reasons I think you should. Crack open a can -- or bottle -- and let's dive right in. 1. It's a low-cost indulgence Coca-Cola is considered a defensive consumer-staples giant. While it does provide a premium-priced product -- at least relative to private-label store-brand cola or tap water -- it's a reasonably priced indulgence. It's considered an "affordable luxury" in the eyes of economists. When times are tough, a sugary soda provides a boost and temporary escapism. Most of Coca-Cola's product portfolio consists of beverages that are priced for most budgets, so it's not a surprise to see the company itself prove resilient during the market's darkest stretches. The Great Recession -- the longest recession in the U.S. since World War II -- officially lasted through all of 2008 and the first half of 2009. How did Coca-Cola hold up? Well, its revenue rose 11% in 2008. It did post a 3% top-line decline in 2009, but its case volume still grew by 3% that year. In short, when it comes to weathering an economic setback, investing in Coca-Cola is it. 2. Dividend checks keep coming and growing A safe harbor when stocks are getting rattled is a quarterly dividend check. The payouts are welcome bursts of incremental income in a sea of downticks, and Coca-Cola is more than just a dividend stock. The beverage bellwether is a Dividend King, jacking up its distribution rate for 63 consecutive years. Do you know how many bear markets have growled in that time? There have been at least 10 bear markets over the past six decades in which stocks plummeted by more than 20%. Coca-Cola kept boosting its dividend annually through all of them. Even better, as a stock drops, the yield for new investments grows larger. Coca-Cola's 2.9% yield would jump to 3.5% if the shares slipped 20%. This is before including the dividend itself that should continue to grow with every passing year. 3. Having a low beta is a good thing in a downturn Suggesting that Coca-Cola stock would decline 20% in a bear market -- as I did in illustrating the power of rising dividends in that last point -- isn't fair. The lord of liquidity should hold up better than the overall market averages in a downturn. Coca-Cola is a low-beta stock. Its five-year beta is a mere 0.42, suggesting that the shares have 42% of the volatility of the overall market. Its one-year beta is an even lower 0.19. 4. It's steady like a beating drum Coca-Cola may not seem cheap, given its historically modest growth. It's trading for 22 times forward earnings. And don't be surprised if analysts keep nudging their profit targets higher. Coca-Cola routinely lands ahead of Wall Street expectations on the bottom line. Just check out how analysts have undershot Coca-Cola's reality since the start of last year. Data source: Yahoo! Finance. EPS = earnings per share (adjusted). From betas to beats, it's hard to resist the allure of Coca-Cola. Its historically low volatility is made for bear markets. It also has some impressive streaks of bottom-line beats and dividend increases. Toss in the recession-resistant nature of its global product offerings, and you have a stock built in a lab -- or a pharmacy soda fountain in Atlanta -- to weather the next bear market as well as it has the previous market setbacks.