Netflix Is Now Just Another TV Firm in Wall Street’s Eyes

What goes around, comes around. Netflix’s stunning 35% collapse on the stock market today should be a lesson to investors in all high-flying companies (I’m thinking of you, Tesla shareholders). The same investors who rush in helter-skelter while a business is expanding, happily paying any price, rush right back out again as soon as growth comes to a halt. And they won’t care how much a stock has already fallen or how cheap it may have become. 

Before Tuesday evening, Netflix shares had dropped 50% since November, when it traded as high as $691. And yet at today’s close of $226, the stock is down nearly 70% from that November high and is back to where it traded at the start of 2018, when Netflix had just over half its current number of subscribers. In a further sign of how things have changed, Netflix is now trading at almost exactly the same multiple of this year’s expected revenue as Disney, the leader of the supposedly slow-growing old-school TV folks, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. What a comedown! Back in January, Netflix’s multiple was twice that of Disney, Koyfin data shows.