Cash cremation.

It is deep in the investor physique to have a flash of trepidation when the contemporary eclipses the established, doubly so when it is the novel contrasted with the well understood. For example, the day Facebook became more valuable than Boeing; or Nintendo generated more sales than Toyota (albeit only for a short time).

Similarly, the news that Netflix Inc. – chief among the post-2009 bull stampede stocks and certainly large cap flagbearer this year (the company is up 85% so far and over 50x from its interim lows at the end of the recession in mid- 2009) – saw its market capitalisation exceed $150 billion, surpassing that of near centennial behemoth Walt Disney Co. (just five years off its one-hundredth birthday).

A brief peek under the kimono makes for interesting reading: the rapidly accelerating Netflix has doubled revenues and net income in the past three years to $11.7 billion and $597 million last year. Disney, which posted a top line of $56.9 billion in the past year, managed a net income figure that approaches Netflix’s revenues, with $9.75 billion over the past year.

Free cash flow is perhaps the most telling bit: while Netflix incinerated just over $2 billion in cash last year and expects to crank that up to an impressive $4 billion of cash burn in 2018, Disney has generated $10.7 billion in FCF over the past four quarters.

It is quite possibly a bull market for Stranger Things.