This Could Be the Defensive Play You’re Looking For

The markets aren’t exactly brimming with confidence at the moment. Investors are on edge — the budding trade war isn’t exactly good news for speculative investments, and even the mere mention of tariffs is enough for investors to brace themselves for losses.

Reallocating a portion (or a more significant portion) of your portfolio from high-risk assets to something a little more conservative might sound boring — but it’s usually the right play at moments like these. Provided that you find the right defensive stock to invest in, your benefit might not be limited to a smaller drawdown or loss — there’s profit to be made in downturns as well, but it requires a little bit of extra legwork in terms of research.

These are trying, uncertain times — but I’m going to put forward one such defensive pick. 

One of my fellow WallStreetZen writers included this stock in his article yesterday — today, I’m goint to take a deeper dive into why I think you ought to give one of the United States’ largest cable and TV providers, Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) a closer look.

At present, it carries an overall Zen Rating of B — and stocks with that distinction have a history of beating the market. To be a bit more precise, they’ve delivered an average annual return of 19.88% since the turn of the millennium.

With market conditions being what they are, the particular strengths of a stock are a bit more important than they usually are. A Zen Rating is a composite of 7 categories, which we call Component Grade ratings. Comcast ranks very favorably in terms of Value and Safety.

To qualify (or rather, quantify) that statement, Comcast stock ranks in the top 4% of the more than 4,600 equities our system tracks according to those two categories.

Let’s dig deeper. At a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 8.57x, CMCSA shares are quite affordable at the moment. The telecom industry average P/E sits at 15.52x — while the market average is around 34x.

Comcast’s profit margins have expanded (albeit slightly) from 12.7% to 13.1% over the past year, while the debt-to-equity ratio has fallen from 2.17 to 2.11 in the same timeframe. 

That might not sound like a great achievement, but for a business of this scale, it’s quite a good showing. This is a $135 billion market cap industry titan — one which has demonstrated a slew of promising metrics, including but not limited to earnings growth outpacing its industry and the wider market, and higher return on assets compared to its industry.

One famous quotes states that quantity has a quality of its own. To adjust that to the stock market, we could say that size has a quality of its own. This is an incredibly entrenched business that operates in a sector with a very high barrier to entry. Beyond that, Comcast is (for better or worse) the only viable choice in many areas of the U.S — not to mention economies of scale and the bundling power that a provider of TV, internet, and phone plans can muster.

There’s one last thing to consider. That’s dividends. Comcast has steadily increased distributions over the past 10 years — and while there have been a few dips, none saw a reduction of more than 10%. A single CMCSA share entitles investors to a $0.33 — for an annual dividend yield of 3.67%.

Comcast stock has fared slightly better than the S&P 500 this year. At the time of writing, CMCSA had lost 3.94% in value since the start 2025 — while the benchmark index had dropped by 4.28%. 

At such a low valuation, one of two things can reasonably happen — either you end up owning a tiny slice of a company that isn’t going anywhere and which has quite stable revenue streams (at a very fair price) — or you end up getting in early on a no-brainer defensive pick that will pick up steam as investors and institutions alike abandon riskier ventures. Recession or no recession, long downturn or short downturn, I really think you ought to give Comcast a closer look.

—> Click here to research CMCSA. If you’re down for some hands-on research, our Most Safe Stocks to Invest In & Buy and Best Value Stocks to Buy Right Now screeners both put Comcast front and center — so if it has piqued your interest, those are two good places to start.

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