Media giant Disney announced its new video streaming platform and Netflix competitor, Disney+, last week. Its stock went up by as much as as 12% and enjoyed its best day since May 2009.
Its current stock price is hovering around $130 a share.
And if you invested in the company 10 years ago, you would have made a profit: A $1,000 investment on April 15, 2009, would be worth more than $7,600 as of April 15, 2019, a total return over 660%, according to CNBC calculations. Over the same period of time, the S&P 500 was up 240%.
Disney's chairman and chief executive officer, Bob Iger, told CNBC that he was "optimistic" about the streaming service "because of the content, because of the user interface and because of the price."
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CNBC: Disney stock as of April 15, 2019
Disney+, which will officially begin streaming mid-November, will start at $6.99 a month or around $70 a year. Disney plans to use it to showcase its popular material, including the "Star Wars" franchise. The company also expects to spend about $1 billion on original content in 2020 and $2 billion by 2024.
Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money," was excited about the company's potential: "How can you not take it? It's a reasonable price. You have an unbelievable library. We have all bought these. ... I've bought every single property of Disney. [For] my kids, it just was kind of a rite of passage," he said. Iger "has transformed this company back to a growth stock in a way that people are saying, 'Finally, I've got one with earnings, with a balance sheet, with a great CEO; I don't have to risk it anymore.' That's what this story is. .... Wow. Wow. Big."
Still, while Disney's stock has shot up recently and has largely performed well over the years, any individual stock can over- or underperform andpast returns do not predict future results.
Some analysts believe Disney's goals are too lofty and that it will be difficult for their streaming service to disrupt major players like Amazon and Netflix. "We do not view Disney+ as a strong alternative to Netflix," Matthew Thornton, a tech analyst at bank holding company Suntrust, said in a note. "Disney+ features family content, while Netflix offers a much broader range of content with the majority of the most-searched content on the platform."
J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth agreed, saying in a note that "while we expect Disney+ will likely be the most competitive streaming offering to Netflix, we still do not view it as a major threat to Netflix subscriber numbers given Netflix's quality & quantity of content."
Disney, which also owns streaming service ESPN+, says by offering both new content and old favorites, it expects to reach between 60 million and 90 million subscribers by 2024, with a third of those subscribers being domestic and two-thirds being international.
By comparison, Netflix had a whopping 148 million total subscribers as of February. Some analysts predict that to grow to 335 million by 2028.
If you're looking to get into investing, seasoned investors like Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban suggest you start with index funds, which hold every stock in an index, meaning they're automatically diversified and tend to be low cost. Plus, because they fluctuate with the market, they're typically less risky than picking individual stocks.
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