Intro
Gavin Magor of Weiss Ratings argues that inflation and an eroding dollar have broken the old definition of a safe stock, and takes the host through four companies he says can raise prices faster than their costs: Coca-Cola, Mastercard, Wheaton Precious Metals and Canadian National Railway. Along the way he is pressed on housing affordability, on what moves a stock that has a moat, on whether a name that has already run is still worth buying, and on why he would rather nobody stacked gold bars at home.
Guest: Gavin Magor, Weiss Ratings
Published: 28 August 2026 on MarketBeat
Episode page | 31 min
Key Takeaways
Everybody should be a little scared, even though the crash calls have all been wrong so far
"the reality is all it's done is to go up"
The country is becoming unaffordable, and the arithmetic on a house no longer works
"the median house price now is over 410,000" against a median salary he puts at 65,000
The debt gets inflated away rather than paid down
"We're trying to inflate our way out of the debt that we have in this country."
Headline index performance hides what the rest of the market is doing
Strip out the Mag 7 and "the performance is not the same"
Safety used to mean a fat yield in a dying industry, and that trade no longer works
"Safety meant sacrifice. You gave up growth to get stability."
The new safe stock is one with pricing power, not one with the biggest payout
Coca-Cola's record of raises is the evidence, not the reason to own it
"64 consecutive years of dividend increases through every recession, every inflation spike, every rate cycle in living memory"
Mastercard takes a percentage, so its revenue rises automatically with prices
"As prices go up, the number on the receipt goes up and Mastercard's take goes right up."
Wheaton Precious Metals gets the upside of gold and silver without the mining costs
"they don't mine a single ounce of gold or silver and that's their edge"
Canadian National sits behind a moat nobody can build around
"There are exactly two Class I railroads in Canada and there will never be a third."
The best time to buy a stock you believe in is now, not at a price you invented
"Don't invest emotionally ever."
Own all four rather than the favorite, and never concentrate everything in one name
Everybody Should Be a Little Scared
The host opens on big tech surging again and says the worry underneath the rally — the economy, the geopolitics around the dollar — is what investors are being distracted from
Magor's answer is unqualified: "Frankly, I think everybody should be a little scared. It really is at that point"
He concedes the collapse calls of the last couple of years have all been wrong: "the reality is all it's done is to go up", with months of hesitation that can reverse inside a single day
The shift toward a tech economy is not avoidable and will change lives "Good or bad, it's just going to make a difference"
The affordability math is the part he keeps returning to: the old rule was that "you weren't expected to buy more than three times your average salary", and now "the median house price now is over 410,000" against "The median salary is 65,000. You're not going to get a mortgage for six times your salary."
He rejects the generational explanation before it is put to him — "there is a massive problem out there that it's not caused by the boomers. I'm a boomer for goodness sake."
On the national debt he says the plan is inflation: "We're trying to inflate our way out of the debt that we have in this country. I mean, $40 trillion." He cannot picture the number — "I struggled when it got to a billion" — and adds "It may as well be a 140 trillion. Probably will be soon."
The Index Is Not the Market
The host says retail investors know the debt and feel the grocery and housing prices, and still look at an S&P 500 near record highs and conclude things are fine
The show's own counterweight, offered by the host: MarketBeat had an analyst on earlier in the week "who was predicting an even larger rally in the S&P 500 later on this year", and the question to Magor is how the economic case sits against it
Magor starts with the people outside the market entirely: "there are a lot of people who are suffering, really suffering, who are not in investing"
The index flatters itself: "if you segregate out the Mag 7 and you start looking at the rest of the S&P, the performance is not the same", and being led by headline performance numbers "can sometimes be unhelpful for you"
His test of how spoiled returns have made investors: offered a guaranteed 7% a year 30 years ago "you would have taken that like a shot", and now "7% doesn't seem all that much"
The technology trade also carries a social problem he expects to price in — "the average person not being happy with having a data center next to them but they need the data to do their own work" — which he thinks makes those names price sensitive and volatile
What he wants instead is a company with a moat that also outperforms, because the inflationary pressures "are destroying the value of the dollar in our pocket"
What Safe Used to Mean, and Why That Formula Broke
The old definition, in his words: "the old idea of a safe investment was built around dividend stocks with big yields sitting in slow boring dynamic dying industries" — utilities, telecoms, tobacco
The formula was to find a company nobody expected to grow, take the fat payout as compensation for the missing upside, and stop there
"Safety meant sacrifice. You gave up growth to get stability."
"But if you think about it, if the dollar value disappears, that formula's broken" — a yield that does not grow loses to inflation
What replaces it is pricing power and a structural edge that keeps working "even as costs rise around them"
His four names are all familiar, and that is the point: "they are not the safe stock of the past"
Coca-Cola: The Dividend Record Is Evidence, Not the Reason
Weiss rates Coca-Cola B+, which Magor says is a buy
The record he leads with: "64 consecutive years of dividend increases through every recession, every inflation spike, every rate cycle in living memory"
"It's proof, not promise, that the brand can push prices ahead of its own costs year after year."
Second-quarter revenue rose 7%, and he says the company is not standing still on the strength of the dividend record alone
On the trademark Coca-Cola brand: "it's just posted its quarterly volume growth 17 years. 17 years outside of the pandemic bounce back. It's the strongest it's ever been."
Shares are up 31% over the last 12 months and sitting about 2.6% off the August high
"So KO doesn't need inflation to win. It just wins bigger when inflation comes along."
A Penny on a Can, and Walking Out With 36 of Them
The host notes Coca-Cola has a good dividend anyway, and asks what else makes it a safer choice
The answer is the price list: they can raise prices "frankly, as they desire", and "A penny increase in their price is a tremendous gain overall."
His illustration of the promotion economics: buy two get one free on a 24-can purchase means "You've just wandered out with 36 cans of Coke", and the company "made a fortune just because they showed you the value"
The host's own anecdote: another analyst on the show buys the stock for his daughter routinely, because it is a brand people connect with and can be watched over decades
Asked whether a 30% year is unusual for a company this solid, Magor says he expects it to continue: efficiency they have "down to a science", growth by acquisition, and dominance of the categories they choose
He expects AI to show up in the cost line rather than the story: they will "be able to produce their drinks at an even cheaper price internally that will then simply increase the margins"
The host draws the general point out of it: these are not AI stocks, but AI will change every industry and pretty much every stock in the market
Mastercard: A Percentage of Every Receipt
His framing of the company: "This is a company we can all love to hate them, but we often use them."
The scale is "billions of times a day somewhere someone is swiping or tapping their Mastercard through the network"
The mechanism is the whole case, and it is not a flat fee: "As prices go up, the number on the receipt goes up and Mastercard's take goes right up." There is "no repricing decision required", and he notes Visa works the same way
Second-quarter revenue grew 14% to $9.3 billion, shares closed at a fresh 52-week high on August 24, up 16% in six months and sitting less than 1% off that high
The picture he uses for it: "they're basically sitting there like the old toll booth on the roads as somebody sort of leans out of the cottage window and they're grabbing the money out of the travelers' baskets as they pass by"
"You have no choice. You want to use them, you're going to pay." And the payer, he says, is you personally
On the card surcharges that spread after 2020: he ran a small business, paid card fees, and included them in his profitability calculations — so companies breaking the fee out separately are "really trying to just make a point to you of tugging it to your heartstrings"
He still calls the fees excessive: "Those fees are charged based on what's going through the throughput and it is excessive, but guess what, you pay them, you have no choice."
The host's version of the same point: every so often a generation talks about moving to cash to avoid "these 3% fees", and it never happens, because cards are how everyone pays for everything
What Actually Moves a Stock That Has a Moat
The host asks why a company with a moat like that still had sharp ups and downs over the last 90 days
Magor puts it on legislative noise: any talk of "some legislative effort to curb fees or to change something then there is always going to be a reaction"
It does not take a bill. "It only has to be somebody with some sort of a thought paper out there that can affect things."
In an information age that he says runs past the social media age, once something gets traction "people start to think about it as if it's a fact and start to consider the downside of that"
The host's read of the chart is that the forward price action came after the end-of-July earnings report, for the reasons Magor had just given
Mastercard Wants Inflation
Asked about future growth, Magor does not hedge: "Oh, they're encouraging inflation. I mean, frankly, they really don't care. They want it."
They want consumers spending as much as they possibly can, because the take moves with the spend
The caveat he supplies himself: if inflation grows, the dollar those revenues are earned in is worth less, so one could argue the company is not growing as quickly as the headline suggests
The offset is geography: Mastercard is not just based in the US, it has "a footprint around the world", and that is "an additional moat for them because no matter what happens to the dollar, they can benefit at the other end"
Wheaton Precious Metals: Paid in Metal, Without the Mines
A Weiss Ratings buy at a B minus, and the third name on the list
"Wheaton Precious Metals doesn't mine, they don't mine a single ounce of gold or silver and that's their edge."
The model: "They pay miners up front for the right to buy their future production and then they sell the metal at whatever the market price is", leaving the miners to absorb rising labor, energy and equipment costs
He counts something like 42 agreements, most of them paying a straight percentage of the spot metal price
"So when gold and silver run, Wheaton's revenue runs up with it uncapped."
The quarter was a record across the board, which he notes happened without gold being at a peak: revenue up 85% to $920 million, net earnings up 86% to 543 million
The dividend has been raised for the third straight year, which he flags as a wrinkle in his own argument — the new safe stocks are supposed not to be dividend stocks, "but they are. They pay a dividend, too."
The stock is up 61% over the last 12 months and has "just shot up an extra 39% in one month" as metal prices rose again
The Downside Case Is Less Profit, Not No Profit
The host asks whether a stock this closely tied to gold is really safe, or is more volatile than the other three
Magor limits the risk to the size of the profit: "Only from a point of view of how much money they can make"
"if gold prices collapsed 30%, then they would only have made $700 million"
"this is a matter of profitability, or levels of profitability, not whether they're going to be profitable or not"
The structural advantage is that they are never committed to paying more than the market for the metal
Diversify by the Nature of the Investment, Not Just by Company
Asked why a precious metals holding belongs in a portfolio built against dollar erosion, he starts by disowning the usual reason
"Although I'm not a gold bug or a silver bug and I know that some folks on our team are, the reality is that having some diversification is always smart."
The mistake he warns against is deciding gold stocks alone will do it, on the theory that one of them pays off
The diversification he means is by type of exposure, not by ticker count: some people "stack kilos of gold in their homes", others hold coins "if they're more normal"
His own preference: "you're probably better off generally in not holding physical gold although there is a very strong argument for having a little bit around"
The practical test he leaves with the listener is how safely and how easily the investment can be accessed
The Best Time to Buy Is Now, Not at a Number You Invented
The host says viewers look at a chart like Wheaton's after a month like that and ask whether they have missed it
His answer starts from the opposite question: the best time to take a loss is now, immediately, before it grows
"in these stocks, if you think that this is a company that's growing, the best time to get in is now because if you wait, yes, it may pull back, in which case you can buy more and dollar cost average"
Keep waiting while it keeps rising and the position stays at zero — "So buy if you believe in a stock, buy it."
"Don't be waiting for it to hit some mythical target that you've set up in your own mind."
"Don't invest emotionally ever."
Canadian National Railway: Two Class I Railroads, and Never a Third
He introduces the last name through the country: "I do love a good Canadian" — great beer, beautiful scenery, lovely people, "and they've also got a fantastic railway system"
Canadian National Railway, CNI, is a buy at a B minus from Weiss, and he acknowledges the stock has taken a dip
"There are exactly two Class I railroads in Canada and there will never be a third." Nobody is assembling the right of way or the capital to build a competing network from scratch
"So that scarcity is the moat", and he says it shows up on the income statement every quarter
Second-quarter adjusted EPS grew 11% and the company raised its full-year guidance in the same year it reported
On why fuel costs do not eat the margin: "Fuel costs get passed straight through on a published, index-linked surcharge." Energy inflation "flows through to the customer by formula" — which, he adds, means the customer pays more anyway
Shares are up 32% over the last 12 months and sit about 3% off the high set on earnings day
"You cannot take that infrastructure away. It's simply there now forever"
Own All Four, Not the One You Like Best
The host's closing question is whether the four are meant as a set, or whether an investor should pick a favorite
His answer is the set: "if I were buying these four stocks now, I would be buying these four stocks, not just one of them, not just two of them"
The reason is that "anything can happen in it at any given time", even where he expects all four to do exceptionally well and "to be inflation-proof"
The eggs-in-one-basket warning has a name attached: "No matter how much you like Nvidia, do not put every single penny you've got into it. Even if it doubled for you when you did, please remember that diversifying your portfolios is critical."
He frames the whole list against the risk-taking other guests have discussed on the show: "This is the opposite. These are stocks that are aimed to give you that new safety."
Magor's bottom line is that a shrinking dollar has moved safety away from the biggest yield and toward companies that can push their prices up faster than their costs — and that an investor who accepts that should own all four of his names rather than whichever one has the best chart.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Coca-Cola, KO (A Weiss B+ buy, and his lead example of pricing power: 64 straight years of dividend increases, a penny on a can that drops through to profit, and promotions that send a shopper home with 36 cans)
Mastercard (The percentage-of-the-receipt business he calls a toll booth, with a global footprint he treats as a second moat against the dollar)
Visa (Named as running the same percentage model, so the same automatic revenue lift applies)
Wheaton Precious Metals (A Weiss buy at B minus that buys future mine production up front and sells at spot, so metal prices flow through uncapped while the miners carry the costs)
Canadian National Railway, CNI (A Weiss buy at B minus whose moat is that Canada has two Class I railroads and will never have a third, with fuel costs passed through by formula)
Weiss Ratings (Magor's firm, and the source of the letter ratings he cites on each name)
Nvidia (Not a recommendation here — the name he uses to warn against putting every penny into a single stock)
The S&P 500 and the Mag 7 (The index he says flatters itself: strip out the seven and the rest of the market looks different)
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