Two decades ago, I learned an important lesson: if you can’t beat them, join them. And if you can’t find a job with the monopolies, then you might as well invest in them!

Take what happened on September 1, 2025. I got an email from Apple saying my Apple TV+ monthly subscription was going up from $9.99 to $12.99. My first reaction was annoyance. Who wants to pay an extra $3 a month for the same shows? Everything should be free, like my weekly newsletter helping readers achieve financial freedom sooner!

But as a shareholder, I was pumped. A 30% price hike is massive for profitability given Apple’s millions of subscribers. I’m not going to unsubscribe due to an extra $3 a month. Then there’s the price hikes of its latest laptops and phones. This is the type of pricing power you only get when you’ve built a monopoly-like ecosystem.

The only logical thing I could think of after that email? Buy more Apple stock.

For reference, a monopoly is a market structure where a single company or entity dominates the supply of a particular product or service, giving it significant power to set prices, control distribution, and limit competition. Because barriers to entry are high—such as patents, exclusive resources, government regulation, or sheer economies of scale—the monopolist can maintain outsized profits and pricing flexibility over time.

Cash Hoards And Large Ecosystems

Traditionally, Apple’s stock sells off after its annual event where it unveils new products. The hype never quite matches Wall Street’s lofty expectations, and 2025’s showcase was no different. But Apple doesn’t need to innovate in the way we think, by launching world-changing gadgets every year. Just repositioning the camera lens 1 millimeter is good enough!

The real “innovation” is Apple’s ability to lock in customers and charge a toll. The App Store’s 30% commission is the perfect example. If you’re a developer and you want your app to succeed, you have no choice but to be inside Apple’s ecosystem. And Apple knows this. The iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Watch—all of these hardware products feed into one sticky universe of recurring revenue. Once you’re in, you don’t leave.

That’s why Apple is only going to continue dominating. As an investor, betting against Apple is betting against super-normal profits.

Google’s Monopoly Looks Good Too

Then there’s Google, another monopoly-like juggernaut. Google pays Apple $20+ billion a year just to be the default search engine in Safari. Imagine that. How can any other search engine compete when Google buys the pole position on the world’s most valuable and popular devices?

Google still commands roughly 90% of the global search market, and that dominance remains unshaken despite the rise of AI LLMs. To my dismay, Google now lifts publisher content and displays it in its AI Overviews, making it even harder for publishers to capture valuable search traffic.

In September 2025, Google was spared the worst possible judgment in its landmark antitrust case. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that while Google cannot enter into exclusive agreements with companies, it is still allowed to pay partners like Apple to distribute its services. Translation: Google can keep sending tens of billions to Apple, and Apple can keep cashing the checks.

That is a win-win for both companies—and their shareholders. It might even be a win for Judge Mehta and his extended family, wink wink. If so, Judge Mehta needs to practice Stealth Wealth instead of suddenly driving around in a Lambo and throwing parties in a new mansion.

How Many Firms Can Compete at This Level?

Only a tiny handful of firms in the world have the financial firepower to play at this level.

The only company that could theoretically compete is Microsoft, with Bing, which nobody cares about. If Microsoft ever decides to go bananas and bid against Google, we might see Apple’s annual payout rise into the $30–$40 billion range. That’s more than the annual GDP of some small countries.

From an investor’s standpoint, you root for these bidding wars. As long as Apple remains the gatekeeper of the world’s most coveted user base, it’s going to get paid.

And as history has shown, regulators and courts rarely break apart such entrenched dominance. When you have enough scale, money, and influence, you can bend politics and policy in your favor.

Strategically, Google should spend more on politicians, instead of the $20 – $30 million a year on lobbying, to protect its monopoly and gain even further ground.

The Winners Keep On Winning

This dynamic isn’t limited to corporations. It’s the same in personal finance.

Think about the wealthy individual in 2010 who had $10 million in investable assets. If that person simply plowed it all into the S&P 500 and reinvested dividends, they’d have around $57 million today, assuming the S&P 500 closes up 10% in 2025. They’ve become a semi-human monopoly—able to buy influence, provide multi-generational wealth, and secure advantages most people can only dream of.

Now contrast that with someone who bought too much home in 2006, got foreclosed on in 2010, and declared bankruptcy. Instead of compounding millions, they ended up with negative net worth and a credit rating in tatters for seven years. They’re like the small competitor trying to claw market share from Apple or Google. The gap only widens with time. The main strategy is to one day sell to Apple or Google, not compete with it.

Just like companies, individuals who already have the resources tend to keep pulling further ahead. The snowball effect is real.

Human Monopolies and Duopolies

This is why I believe investors should focus more of their attention on monopoly-like and oligopoly-like companies. If the government isn’t going to stop them—and history suggests it rarely does—you might as well benefit.

OpenAI and Anthropic, for example, are the two emerging giants in AI large language models. While both are private for now, their oligopoly structure is already forming, along with Llama and Gemini.

In consumer products, Coca-Cola and Pepsi dominate global soft drinks in a classic duopoly. If you believe the world will keep guzzling sugary beverages despite the health risks, these stocks make sense.

In payments, Visa and Mastercard form another entrenched oligopoly. If you think consumers will keep spending beyond their means and paying double-digit interest rates on revolving credit, owning these companies is a rational choice.

The pattern is clear: these entrenched players are allowed to grow bigger and more profitable while regulators look the other way. Politicians often own shares in the very monopolies they’re supposed to regulate.

So why shouldn’t you?

Adapt or Perish

Of course, disruption is always possible. OpenAI and Anthropic have already taken bites out of Google’s search business as more people rely on AI-generated answers. This is another reason why I’ve decided to invest in both OpenAI and Anthropic as a hedge.

But disruption doesn’t eliminate the monopoly dynamic—it just shifts it. Today’s upstart is tomorrow’s entrenched winner. For now, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Visa, and Mastercard are still firmly in control.

Companies adapt. Investors must as well. The alternative is irrelevance.

My Investing Philosophy Going Forward

For the average person, investing in a low-cost S&P 500 ETF remains the simplest and most effective wealth-building strategy. But if you’re reading Financial Samurai, you likely care about money more than most. As a result, you’re willing to think strategically about how to tilt the odds in your favor.

That’s why I like building concentrated exposure to select monopolies and oligopolies within your portfolio. These are the companies that will likely generate the most consistent profits, wield the most pricing power, and deliver the strongest returns over time. When these companies inevitably correct, I will buy the dip.

Yes, complain about injustice if you want. Yes, worry about inequality. But at the end of the day, if it’s legal and profitable, the rational investor joins the winning side. Because if you can’t beat them, you might as well invest in them.

That’s not cynicism. That’s survival.

Readers, are you investing in monopolies and oligopolies as part of your strategy? Or maybe backing startups that could one day get acquired by them? I’d love to hear your perspective—why do you think the government and courts aren’t more proactive in breaking up these giants for the sake of consumers?

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. I’m simply sharing what I’m doing with my own money. Please do your own research, invest only in what you understand, and never risk more than you can afford to lose. All investments carry risk, and your decisions are yours alone.

Subscribe To Financial Samurai 

Pick up a copy of my USA TODAY national bestseller, Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps to Seven Figures. I’ve distilled over 30 years of financial experience to help you build more wealth than 94% of the population—and break free sooner.

Listen and subscribe to The Financial Samurai podcast on Apple or Spotify. I interview experts in their respective fields and discuss some of the most interesting topics on this site. Your shares, ratings, and reviews are appreciated.

To expedite your journey to financial freedom, join over 60,000 others and subscribe to the free Financial Samurai newsletter. You can also get my posts in your e-mail inbox as soon as they come out by signing up here. Financial Samurai is among the largest independently-owned personal finance websites, established in 2009. Everything is written based on firsthand experience and expertise.

What if one of the best ways to get wealthy is to trick yourself into thinking you’re poor?

It sounds counterintuitive, even ridiculous. But after decades of saving, investing, and observing how people behave around money, I’ve realized one thing: abundance often breeds complacency.

When you feel flush, you spend more, work less, and get sloppy. When you feel broke—even artificially—you hustle harder, spend carefully, and grow wealth faster. And as we all know, the path to financial freedom comes down to one formula: save and invest as aggressively as you can, for as long as you can. The problem is sustainability.

The ~5% national median saving rate simply isn’t enough. Needing 19 years to save one year of expenses means you’ll never be free. Aim for at least 20%, and if you can push yourself to hit 50% for 10 years, your future self will thank you many times over.

Feeling Lazy And Unmotivated After Summer Vacation

Ever since coming back to San Francisco from my five-plus weeks in Honolulu, I’ve been feeling more lazy than usual. I started wondering why everybody doesn’t live in a place like Hawaii, where the weather is always great and the vibes are always friendly. Grinding so hard in San Francisco seemed pointless and a surefire way to burnout.

You don’t have to be rich in Honolulu because the beaches, hikes, and sunshine are free and accessible for all. If you’re a local, you even get Kamaʻāina rates for golf and other attractions, saving you even more money. Although I spent three-and-a-half weeks helping remodel my parents’ in-law unit, I felt much more at ease doing less.

The problem with coming back to San Francisco is that the vast majority of people are hustlers. Most are trying to climb the corporate ladder or build a company for greater status and money. These actions run counter to the FIRE lifestyle of giving up money and status for freedom.

But given I’ll be stuck in San Francisco for at least the next four years, I need to be careful not to act too lazy. Because if I do, I’ll start feeling FOMO from the ongoing AI/tech boom. And feeling left behind is one of the worst feelings you can have.

A Solution to Getting Rich Is to Feel Poor

As I found myself waking up later and later, I realized I needed a way to motivate myself again. Given I’m no longer a stay-at-home dad, increasing productivity felt required.

Then one day, while checking my banking app, I noticed that my checking account was in the red by $109.97. Doh! I had paid my annual life insurance premium automatically and forgot to leave enough in my checking account.

Since making a terrible two-year mistake with a life insurance policy, I’ve been intentionally keeping my checking account light to avoid wasteful spending. And with a free $5,000 overdraft line of credit, being down $100 wasn’t a big deal. I topped it up from money from our joint account.

But here’s what mattered: seeing red on my account made me perk up and take notice.

To be frank, I felt poor. How could I, with multiple streams of passive income, not even have enough to cover a life insurance payment? Yet with that temporary feeling of not having enough came a renewed sense of urgency—to stay on top of my finances and grind once more.

Living on the Financial Edge Makes You Focus

A couple of weeks later, rental income, dividend income, and bond income replenished my checking account. But the lesson stuck with me.

Having a checking account flush with cash earning 0.1% interest was actually demotivating. It pulled me back to the lazier state I’d fallen into after returning from Honolulu.

So I decided to transfer out nearly all my excess checking funds—keeping just enough to cover upcoming bills—into my Fidelity brokerage account. The goal was to always try and keep my checking account always close to $0 as possible. That way:

1. My idle cash could earn ~4% in a money market fund at my brokerage account.
2. I could dollar-cost average into stocks or bonds easily during market pullbacks.
3. I could allocate more into alternatives like venture funds to hedge against the AI revolution for my kids’ future.

Now, whenever I log into my banking app, I see hardly any money. And you know what? That scarcity forces me to think twice before swiping my credit card since I don’t have enough funds to pay by debit card. If a purchase isn’t a “hell yes!”, it’s a no.

Instead of ordering takeout, I’ll cook at home or live off my insides and fast. Instead of buying new sneakers, I’ll finally wear the ones collecting dust in my closet. This artificially imposed scarcity has reactivated my discipline. And long-term discipline is what we all need to FIRE.

Recreating the Hunger of When You Had Nothing

The whole idea of keeping yourself financially lean is to recreate the hunger of your early days, when you had little to nothing. If you want to achieve FIRE, sacrifices must be made.

Back in 1999, fresh out of William & Mary, I shared a studio apartment with a friend to save on rent in NYC. I’d get to the office by 5:30am and stay past 7pm to connect with colleagues in Asia before heading home. It was nice to also gain access to the cafeteria for a free dinner and some extra food for breakfast.

I put on 15–20 pounds, developed TMJ, and dealt with plantar fasciitis, all from the stress of hustling on Wall Street for money. But those sacrifices laid the foundation for everything that followed.

By living frugally after promotions, I was able to bank the difference and invest aggressively. That discipline compounded over decades, and has made living far easier today.

However, as I grind toward a new passive income goal by December 31, 2027, I see the wisdom of returning to that mindset. We must find ways to continuously save and invest more if we want to one day stop trading time for money.

The Bull Market Can Make You Weak

Bull markets are intoxicating. When your investments are compounding faster than your active income, it feels like you’ve hacked life with a cheat code. You start to believe you can’t lose.

But complacency is dangerous. I watched it happen in 2007. People levered up, bought multiple properties with no-money-down loans, and assumed the party would never end. By 2009, many had lost everything and had to rebuild from scratch. I was one of these people who foolishly bought a vacation property I certainly didn’t need in 2007. It ended up declining in value by 50%.

I don’t want to relive the trauma of seeing my net worth fall 35–40% in six months. And I don’t want that for you either.

That’s why artificially feeling poor—especially in bull markets—isn’t just a motivational trick. It’s a safeguard against overconfidence and reckless behavior.

Practical Ways to Feel Poor To Stat Disciplined When Times Are Good

If you’d like to try this strategy yourself, here are some ideas:

1. Keep your checking account lean. Only maintain 1 month of expenses in checking. Move the rest into higher-yielding accounts in your brokerage.
2. Auto-transfer your surplus. Each payday, sweep extra funds into a brokerage, high-yield savings, or investments. Out of sight, out of mind.
3. Challenge yourself with no-spend weeks. Pick two weeks a month to avoid discretionary purchases. You’ll realize how much you can cut.
4. Simulate living paycheck-to-paycheck. Cap your monthly spending at a fraction of your income, and redirect the rest into investments.
5. Revisit your “broke college” habits. Cook cheap meals, ride public transit, share resources, and embrace minimalism—even temporarily.
6. Audit your subscriptions. Cancel what you don’t truly need. Every forgotten $10/month service adds to lifestyle creep. Did I just see Apple raising their Apple TV+ by $4 to $14/month?
7. Practice gratitude daily. Remind yourself how far you’ve come, and that you can survive with less.

Artificial scarcity doesn’t mean living in fear, it means using small doses of discomfort as a tool to stay sharp, disciplined, and motivated. It’s about keeping things real and humble, while you build ever more wealth.

Embrace The Paradox of Wealth

So if you want to grow rich, adopt a broke mindset. If you can endure that self-imposed discipline, you’ll almost certainly end up wealthier than the average person who spends freely without intention.

In the end, wealth isn’t just about the numbers in your accounts. It’s about having the mindset to stay focused for decades. And sometimes, the mindset that works best is remembering what it felt like to have nothing, and making sure you never go back.

Readers, do you artificially make yourself feel poor to grow rich? In a country with so much abundance, how do we do a better job to combat laziness so that we can continue to build generational wealth?

Free Financial Analysis Offer From Empower

One of the best ways to “feel poor” is to get brutally honest about where your money is really going. If you have over $100,000 in investable assets—whether in savings, taxable accounts, 401(k)s, or IRAs—you can get a free financial check-up from an Empower financial professional by signing up here.

Think of it as holding up a mirror: a seasoned expert, who builds and analyzes portfolios for a living, can uncover hidden fees draining your wealth, inefficient allocations slowing down your growth, or overlooked opportunities to put your money to work harder. Sometimes that outside perspective is exactly what you need to sharpen discipline and stay hungry.

The statement is provided to you by Financial Samurai (“Promoter”) who has entered into a written referral agreement with Empower Advisory Group, LLC (“EAG”).

Subscribe To Financial Samurai 

Pick up a copy of my USA TODAY national bestseller, Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps to Seven Figures. I’ve distilled over 30 years of financial experience to help you build more wealth than 94% of the population—and break free sooner.

Listen and subscribe to The Financial Samurai podcast on Apple or Spotify. I interview experts in their respective fields and discuss some of the most interesting topics on this site. Your shares, ratings, and reviews are appreciated.

To expedite your journey to financial freedom, join over 60,000 others and subscribe to the free Financial Samurai newsletter. You can also get my posts in your e-mail inbox as soon as they come out by signing up here.

Financial Samurai is among the largest independently-owned personal finance websites, established in 2009. Everything is written based on firsthand experience and expertise.

What do you do when you’ve reached financial independence? JL Collins says it depends entirely on your spending rate, not just your net worth.

Collins joins us for part two of our conversation about what happens after you reach financial independence. He tackles the question of whether you should invest differently once you’ve “won the game.”

Someone with $5 million spending $100,000 per year sits in a completely different position than someone with the same amount spending $200,000 per year. The first person can afford to stay aggressive with stocks. The second person needs bonds to smooth the ride.

Collins walks through his withdrawal strategy using his daughter as an example. She stepped away from corporate life in her early thirties and now follows an 80-20 stock/bond allocation. 

She pulls dividends from both funds into her checking account, covering about 2.5 percent of her target 4 percent withdrawal rate. Vanguard automatically sells shares to cover the remaining 1.5 percent.

We cover Collins’ thoughts on the 4 percent rule, which he calls extraordinarily conservative. He references Bill Bengen’s research showing that 5 percent withdrawals succeed 86 percent of the time. 

Collins would take those odds to escape a soul-crushing job, especially since most financially independent people end up accidentally making money anyway.

We discuss the tension between frugal habits that build wealth – and learning to spend money once you have it. Collins flies first class, but he drives a basic car.

Collins explains why financially independent people often stay engaged with work — the problem was never work itself, but working without agency.

Timestamps:

Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths.

(0:00) Intro

(2:00) Investing when you’ve won the game

(5:30) Spending rate versus total wealth

(8:00) Three-year versus ten-year timelines

(11:00) Adding bonds gradually or all at once

(14:00) Why 4 percent is extraordinarily conservative

(17:00) Soul crushing jobs and 5 percent risk

(24:16) Withdrawal frequency and dividends

(27:16) Automatic share sales setup

(31:16) Starting business while financially independent

(36:16) Accidentally making money after retirement

(47:09) Agency versus having to work

(50:09) Spending advice for frugal philanthropists

(54:09) Charity auction magnifying effect

Resources Mentioned:
How I Discovered the 4% Rule, with Bill Bengen | Podcast
Bill Bengen created the 4% rule. Now He Thinks We Can Withdraw More  | Podcast

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Want to make boatloads of money? Bet on the right stock at the right time. Palantir Technologies (PLTR 4.38%) is an excellent example of how this can work. A $10,000 investment made when the company went public in late 2020 would be worth $146,000 today — a return of 1,270% compared to the S&P 500‘s return of 84% over the same time frame.

That said, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. And Palantir’s rocket ship rally made its shares uncomfortably expensive compared to market averages. Let’s dig deeper to see if the data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) leader is still capable of multibagger long-term returns.

A unique take on data analytics and AI

Since its founding in 2003, Palantir focused on providing software to help public- and private-sector clients identify trends, detect fraud, and optimize their operations through big data analytics. Investors became particularly excited about the stock after it began incorporating generative AI-related functionality into its offerings, allowing it to deliver real-time insights in situations like battlefields or law enforcement.

More importantly, AI-related demand seems to be having a significant impact on the company’s operations. First-quarter earnings were excellent, with revenue jumping 39% year over year to $883.9 million, while profits more than doubled to $217.7 million.

However, investors should note that much of this growth came from Palantir’s commercial segment, where it sells software to private enterprises instead of the government. While this likely represents a larger market opportunity, its economic moat against rivals is shallower.

In the private sector, Palantir is less able to leverage its trust, political connections, and security clearances to compete. And it will face stiff competition from rivals like Microsoft and Amazon, which offer similar data analytics software and services. These companies are also much more vertically integrated than Palantir because they also operate robust in-house cloud computing services, while Palantir is more reliant on third-party infrastructure.

Is Palantir a millionaire-maker stock?

In order to turn a $10,000 initial investment into $1 million, Palantir will have to grow by a further 585% from its current price. On the surface, seems looks easy for a stock that has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of almost 74% since hitting the market less than five years ago. However, things are very different now. The larger a company becomes, the harder it becomes to grow. Customers become harder to find, and bigger contracts are needed to move the needle.

A 585% increase in Palantir’s stock price would give the company a market cap of $2.33 trillion, making it the fifth-largest company in the U.S. behind Amazon. While this is technically possible over the long term, it is unclear if Palantir’s addressable market can support this much expansion. Other tech giants like Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft serve much larger opportunities and often boast higher levels of diversification.

For example, while Palantir has a niche focus on data analytics, Microsoft’s competing platform, Fabric, likely only represents a small part of its $245.1 billion software empire.

Palantir’s earnings and revenue also haven’t kept up with its stock price growth, leading to an incredibly high price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 627 compared to the S&P 500 average of 29. This inflated valuation suggests there isn’t much room for fundamentals-led growth. Palantir investors should consider taking profits before there is a correction in the stock.

John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Will Ebiefung has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Most investors understand there’s no actual mathematical benefit to a stock split. In the same sense that holding two $10 bills is the equivalent to holding one $20 bill, doubling the number of a company’s outstanding shares simply cuts the value of those shares in half — no net value is created in the process, no matter how many new shares are issued.

As most veteran investors can attest, however, there’s still a beneficial bullish buzz surrounding most stocks before, during, and after a split. Indeed, even if it’s only a temporary boost, researchers with Bank of America note that stocks gain an average of about twice that of the broad market over the course of the 12 months following a split. Clearly, investors like the unspoken implications of such a move!

Be careful of jumping to sweeping conclusions about these average results, though. Like any other mathematical-mean figure, it can be made up of a wide range of inputs, some of which are at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum as the average number itself.

In other words, a stock split alone doesn’t guarantee a bullish performance. The underlying company must still be worth owning. If it isn’t, its ticker is still a bad bet.

With that as the backdrop, here’s a closer look at two different companies, one of which will soon be undergoing a confirmed stock split, and the other which may soon make such an announcement. One’s worth buying, while the other one is arguably best left avoided.

Buy: Netflix

Streaming giant Netflix (NFLX -1.99%) hasn’t made any official indication that a stock split is in the works, for the record. But there are a couple of good reasons to expect one soon.

The first of these reasons is the fact that the last time the company’s stock neared the price of $1,000 — where it is now — management felt compelled to initiate a 7-for-1 split. Such a frothy price point makes it a logistically complicated name for some institutions to buy and hold, as well as makes it downright unapproachable for the typical individual investor to step into. Since no company wants to stymie interest in its own stock, Netflix is likely to address this potential problem before it becomes one.

And the second reason a stock split could be in the works? CEO Reed Hastings recently suggested he’s aiming for a trillion-dollar market cap as soon as 2030. That would mean a doubling of the company’s current market value, or doubling the stock’s already-frothy price to nearly $2,400 per share, thus making its current approachability problem even bigger.

A potentially impending split isn’t the only reason to dive into Netflix stock here, however, or perhaps even the top reason. There’s a bigger and better bullish argument for buying a stake in this streaming titan at this time. Simply put, the streaming industry is at a turning point, and Netflix is coming out of this turn as a clear leader.

Think about it. Just within the past few months, Walt Disney has arranged to offload its Hulu service onto FuboTV. Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly increasingly frustrated that its Apple TV+ service is reportedly still losing a ton of money, while a handful of less-popular streaming services like AMC Networks and even Disney’s ESPN+ and aforementioned Hulu are losing paying subscribers.

These are all signs that most U.S. households (which is the industry’s most important market) are tightening up their streaming budgets, suggesting a saturation and maturation of the streaming market. Underscoring this argument are numbers from Reviews.org indicating that Americans households spent 23% less on streaming services in 2024 than they did in 2023, mostly because they’ve got access to more content than they can feasibly consume — a trend confirmed by Xperi-owned TiVo in its Q4-2024 Video Trends Report.

At first blush, this seems problematic for Netflix. It’s not, though. See, Netflix has become such a dominant name within the premium video-on-demand business that it’s almost become synonymous with it. If domestic consumers subscribe to any streaming services, it’s first and foremost apt to be Netflix. It’s also the one service they’re least likely to cancel, with its consistent industry-low churn rate of less than 2%, according to industry research outfit Antenna.

Connect the dots. Netflix is cementing itself as the centerpiece of most peoples’ streaming services. It may well reach that trillion-dollar market cap mark within the next five years as its competitors start scaling back their spending and start playing more defense.

Avoid: Coca-Cola Consolidated

Stock splits can’t save every ticker, though. Enter Coca-Cola Consolidated (COKE -0.22%), which has not only recently announced a stock split, but has recently completed one. On Tuesday, May 27, its shares split on a 10-for-1 basis, dialing their price back from more than $1,000 apiece to just over $100 now.

This isn’t the Coca-Cola Company you likely hear so much about, to be clear… the one Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has been sitting on for years now. That Coca-Cola only manages and markets the company’s brand names you know, selling concentrated flavor syrups to authorized bottlers. Coca-Cola Consolidated is one of these third-party partners. It’s the United States’ single-biggest Coke bottler, in fact.

At first blush, a partnership with the world’s best-known beverage name seems like a boon, and in many ways, it is. These agreements aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be, though. Namely, this arrangement offloads a great deal of the cost-based risk of the business to the bottlers themselves; the Coca-Cola Company’s collecting its high-margin royalties for each bottle of beverage sold under its labels, no matter how much the bottler was required to spend producing and delivering it.

That leaves all bottlers like this one vulnerable to inflation, and its impact on consumer spending. And we’re seeing this impact now. Following 2024’s brewing fiscal headwind, business took a clear turn for the worse during the first quarter of this year. Revenue fell just a bit, but total volume fell 6.6% year over year; price increases are finally doing more harm than good. Net income slipped by about a third. It’s not like the circumstances behind this weakness are now abating, either.

Dividends could help bolster the bullish argument, but in this case, there’s not enough dividend income to matter. This stock’s forward-looking dividend yield currently stands at less than 1%, and unlike The Coca-Cola Company itself, Coca-Cola Consolidated’s yearly per-share dividend payment is inconsistent even if it’s been upped tremendously since early 2023.

It’s not the worst stock in the world, to be fair, with or without its split. There are just too many other more compelling investments to bother diving into this one.