Safety Stocks Are Not What They Used to Be: 4 Names Built for a Weaker Dollar

Key Points

• Coca-Cola's 64-year dividend growth streak is backed by pricing power rather than habit.
• Mastercard collects a percentage of every transaction rather than a flat fee, so revenue reprices automatically as costs rise.
• Wheaton Precious Metals and Canadian National Railway supply two very different moats, uncapped metals exposure and irreplaceable rail infrastructure.

Big tech is rallying again, and the rally is doing an effective job of hiding what sits underneath it. The national debt is climbing toward $40 trillion. The median existing home costs roughly $398,000 against a median household income near $84,000, a ratio that hasn't looked normal in decades. And the headline number on the S&P 500 keeps flattering a market where a small group of megacaps is doing most of the lifting.

That gap between what the index says and what the economy feels like is the story investors keep skipping past. Strip out the Magnificent Seven, and the rest of the index tells a much quieter story.

Here's the part that changes the math: if the dollar in your pocket keeps losing ground, the old defensive playbook stops protecting you. Safety used to mean parking money in something slow with a fat yield. That formula assumed a currency that held its value. It no longer does.

The Old Safe-Stock Formula Broke When the Dollar Did

Gavin Magor, director of research at Weiss Ratings, argues the definition of "safety" needs rewriting. The old version meant utilities, telecoms and tobacco: companies nobody expected to grow, paying you to accept that. Safety meant sacrifice.

The new version looks different. Magor's screen is for businesses with structural pricing power, companies whose economics improve as costs rise around them rather than getting squeezed. His team also publishes ongoing research on the policy forces quietly eroding retirement savings, and it's worth reviewing alongside any defensive positioning.

Four names clear Magor's bar, across four unrelated corners of the market.

Coca-Cola Raises Prices Faster Than Its Own Costs Rise

Coca-Cola NYSE: KO carries a B+ rating from Weiss. The company has now raised its dividend for 64 consecutive years, through every recession and every rate cycle in living memory. That's not a promise, it's a receipt.

It isn't coasting on the streak either. Second-quarter net revenue rose 7% to $13.38 billion, organic revenue grew 6%, and global unit case volume climbed 5% with every reporting segment contributing. Comparable operating margin expanded to 35.6%. Management lifted full-year guidance in late July.

Magor's point is about mechanics, not brand affection. A penny of price on a global volume base compounds into serious money, and Coca-Cola has spent a century proving customers absorb it. Inflation doesn't threaten that model. It feeds it.

Mastercard Collects a Percentage, Not a Flat Fee

Mastercard NYSE: MA earns a B- from Weiss, and its moat is almost embarrassingly simple. It takes a cut of the transaction, and the cut is a percentage. When the number on the receipt goes up, so does the take. No repricing decision required.

That played out in the second quarter: net revenue up 14% to $9.3 billion, adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $5.04, and gross dollar volume up 8% on a local-currency basis to $2.9 trillion. Value-added services revenue grew 18% currency-neutral.

The volatility investors have seen tends to arrive on regulatory headlines rather than fundamentals. Any credible talk of legislated fee caps moves the stock.

The offset is geography: Mastercard's global footprint means dollar weakness doesn't hit it the way it hits a domestic-only earner.

Wheaton Precious Metals Gets Metals Upside Without Mining Costs

Wheaton Precious Metals NYSE: WPM is also a Weiss B-, and it doesn't mine an ounce of anything. It pays miners upfront for the right to buy future production, then sells at spot.

Miners absorb rising labor, fuel and equipment costs. Wheaton's exposure to the metal price is uncapped.

The second quarter was a record: revenue up 85% to $929 million, net earnings up 86% to $543 million, and operating cash flow of $650 million. Realized gold-equivalent pricing rose 61% year over year. The portfolio spans 22 operating mines and 26 development projects, and the quarterly dividend of $0.195 marked an 18% increase from a year earlier.

The risk is real and worth naming: if metals prices roll over, Wheaton earns less. What it doesn't do is stop earning.

Canadian National Railway Owns a Moat Nobody Can Rebuild

Canadian National Railway NYSE: CNI, another Weiss B-, has the most literal moat of the four. Canada has exactly two Class I railroads, and there will not be a third. Nobody is assembling the right-of-way or the capital to lay a competing network from scratch.

Second-quarter revenue rose 11% to C$4.75 billion, with adjusted diluted EPS up 11%, and management raised full-year guidance to mid-to-high single-digit adjusted EPS growth. Fuel inflation gets passed through to customers on a published index-linked surcharge, so energy costs flow through by formula rather than eating margin. That infrastructure isn't going anywhere.

Diversification Still Matters Inside a Safety Portfolio

Magor's own answer, when asked whether investors should pick a favorite, was that he'd own all four. Four sectors, four unrelated moats, one shared characteristic. No matter how much you like NVIDIA NASDAQ: NVDA, the all-eggs-in-one-basket problem doesn't disappear because the basket is winning.

He's equally blunt about timing. Waiting for a stock to hit a number you invented in your own head usually means owning zero shares of something you believed in. Watch the pricing power, not the price target, because pricing power is what survives a weaker dollar.