Disney just had its worst day in a year and a half

Disney managed a rare feat for a legacy media company: Its streaming service actually turned a profit — with some caveats. But Wall Street still wasn’t satisfied, sending shares down more than 9%. It was Disney’s worst stock trading day in 18 months.

Disney managed a rare feat for a legacy media company: Its streaming service actually turned a profit — with some caveats. But Wall Street still wasn’t satisfied, sending shares down more than 9%. It was Disney’s worst stock trading day in 18 months. See here: Disney (DIS), fresh off its victory in a bruising (and stupidly expensive) boardroom proxy battle last month, for the first time ever squeezed some profit out of Disney+ and Hulu, to the tune of $47 million. But Disney’s other streaming property, ESPN+, continued to shed subscribers and hemorrhage cash, bringing the combined streaming loss to $18 million. That’s a lot of money, but it is a pretty huge improvement over the $659 million loss the collective streaming business reported in the same period a year ago. Wall Street is always looking ahead to future growth, of course, so it was the projected slowdown next quarter that had investors in a tizzy. “In my view, they delivered some pretty good results,” Paul Verna, a principal analyst at eMarketer, told me. “What the Street seems to be reacting to is the guidance for some softness in entertainment streaming next quarter.” Disney said it still expects for the combined streaming business to achieve profitability by the end of its fiscal year, in September.