MCD is a long-term hold: its real estate is likely worth far more than what was spent, giving stability and backing shareholders even in a catastrophe. Its 3.3% dividend yield is near a 10-year high after 50 straight years of increases; it won't be the best performer and may or may not be worth more in 10 years.

Okay, for the last stock here, I might be the first person on this channel to highlight it . The reason I'm highlighting it is because I don't think anything is going to sink this business between now and 2036, and I'll explain why.

This company is McDonald's. The stock symbol is MCD.

Now, this is, of course, the largest restaurant company in the world. Everyone knows about golden brackets. They don't come up much among investors talking about good long-term opportunities, but I want to talk about some things you might not know about McDonald's.

So, it generates revenue in three main ways. The company owns its own restaurants. Some of them —not many in comparison—but They own some of them, so they make direct sales from selling you a Big Mac.

And more than that, they have franchisees who sell you Big Macs, and they get royalties and franchise fees from that. That's actually a bigger source of revenue than their own sales.

But the biggest source of revenue, which surprises a lot of people, is actually rent. They own the real estate. They own roughly 50% of the land their buildings are on, and they own most of the buildings when we're talking about all their restaurants around the world.

So they charge their franchisees monthly rent to stay there, and that's where they make about 40% of their revenue.

So, you're telling me McDonald's is a real estate company? Yes, it is. And I think that's what gives them stability. When you think about a restaurant company, you know there are some restaurant companies where sales start to decline, rent comes due, and they're basically on very small profit margins , and things can start to go downhill for them.

McDonald's, the parent company, doesn't really have to worry about that because they own the land.

They've spent almost $50 billion—the numbers This is a bit complicated, but they probably spent around $50 billion to acquire all that land. Okay, but you have to understand that this doesn't show up on the balance sheet .

They don't provide estimates of the value of their land and buildings to arrive at a book value, do they?

So, I think there's a strong argument that their real estate is actually worth much more than they spent to buy it, because some of it was acquired decades ago, and its value has only increased.

In fact , even if McDonald's were to completely lose its appeal to consumers, that land would still be valuable because it's often in very prime locations that other restaurants would want .

So, even if things get really bad for McDonald's in the next ten years, they'll still have the entire real estate business backing them up, and they could liquidate or sell it and generate huge sums for shareholders.

But I don't think that's going to happen. I'm just saying, if a catastrophic scenario were to occur for McDonald's, it's still very stable.

But I think you're suggesting here that we should form a private equity group, buy McDonald's, and sell all its real estate, and I don't know , I'm sure some activist would say That's the best way to unlock that value, definitely.

Hmm, McDonald's isn't in a position to do that. It's perfectly fine, and its stock has dropped. The dividend yield is currently near a 10- year high of 3.3%. This is a company that has paid its dividend and increased it for 50 consecutive years now, which puts it in a very privileged position .

Will it be the best performer on this list? Absolutely not. Will this company be more valuable in 10 years than it is now? I'd say maybe . Random question as we speak. One of the things I think about McDonald's is that it has resilience.

I mean, it's one of those places kids ask to go to all the time just to get that silly toy. You know, Happy Meals are still as popular with kids as they were when I was a kid. Do you think McDonald's will have as many employees in 10 years ?

Because looking at what McDonald's looks like now, there are far fewer employees, far fewer human interactions, and, man, when you think about making a burger, you think about situations Using robots.

I mean, they've moved in that direction with a lot of automation for a lot of different things, but this is very compelling. I don't know if this is good or bad for McDonald's, but it looks like the future of this company, if it's just about making the same burger over and over again, we might simply get humanoid robots taking our orders.

At the very least, I think McDonald's has a greater than 50% chance of eliminating the cashier job within the next decade. I don't see where this process needs to happen. It's already gone in a lot of places, yes.

Exactly. You can do it either through the app or you can do it at the kiosk inside the store. I don't think there's a compelling reason to keep a cashier at McDonald's, and this makes the back-end operations much more efficient , which is attractive to the franchisee as well because it's a way they can be more profitable.

Yes, that's one. Yes, if you don't look at McDonald's, it's great to understand how much of the business is really based on real estate, and that's a strong part of the business, but I also agree that McDonald's isn't going anywhere.