Volatility has spread across all major markets around the world after Britain’s vote to leave the EU last week. Roughly two and a half trillion US dollars were wiped from global markets the day after the Brexit referendum. Investors headed towards the safety of government bonds even in the UK where the yield of the 10-Year government bond fell below 1% for the first time ever.
Some experts are even warning UK residents of a technical recession. Many analysts are pricing in interest rate cuts this year. They say a 25 basis points decrease could come as soon as later this month as the Bank of England tries to stem the impact of the Brexit fallout. Of course nobody can say for sure how the economy will play itself out over time. Conventional wisdom can often tell us one thing when the opposite is true. Business Week magazine famously published an issue in August 1979, claiming that the stock market is probably doomed. The sensational title on the front cover the magazine read, “The death of equities. How inflation is destroying the stock market.” However, as we know now the two decades following 1979 was quite possibly the best bull market run in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Then on October 19th, 1987, stock markets around the world crashed, shedding a huge value in a very short time. The crash began in Hong Kong and spread west to Europe, hitting the United States after other markets had already declined by a significant margin. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points to 1,739. This large downward move in the markets was called Black Monday. But in the end the market managed to recover. So whatever damage Brexit will do to the world’s markets I’m sure in a few decades the impact will only appear as a small, insignificant part of the long term chart. But speaking of the Dow Jones index, one of its most well known companies is the Walt Disney Company (DIS.)
Disney (DIS) stock fell 3.33% to $95.72 on volume of 14.3 million shares on Friday right after the Brexit vote. But this recent fall in the share price may be a great opportunity to invest in this large multi-media conglomerate. As investors we must have a greater appetite for making a profit than the fear of losing money. But at the same time we should try to mitigate our risks when choosing which stocks to invest in. One way to do this is to buy and hold defensive stocks that pay out growing dividends over time. Disney is a great example of this.
Disney is a huge company, worth over $100 billion, which is more than Viacom B Inc (NASDAQ:VIAB), News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA), or Time Warner Inc (NYSE:TWX). Disney is a household name with a very strong brand. They also remained innovative and stayed profitable throughout 90 years across generations of fans. Today Disney employs over 100,000 people, and run some of the largest projects in the entertainment business. Not only do they know how to market themselves, but they actively seek other synergistic brands to buy and integrate into their empire. Disney has a fantastic business model when it comes to running their animation and production studios. Instead of looking to hire top talent for computer graphics engineers Disney simply buys the companies that already employs these skilled people, and with it comes all the technology and infrastructure as well.
This is what happened when Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion. Later on Disney would go to purchase other media companies like Marvel and Lucasfilm which is why we have the present generation of superhero and Star Wars movies. With such a strong brand, and a profitable and diverse business plan, Disney appears to be trading at fair market value today with a price to earnings ratio of 18 times, which is less expensive than most of its peers. Picking up some DIS shares at this point wouldn’t be a bad idea.