McDonald’s is a multinational blue chip firm which will hold its own no matter how bad the market gets. That’s because McDonald’s is not only well entrenched in mature markets like the United States and Europe, but is growing rapidly in the emerging markets such as India, China, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

In fact, McDonald’s has a program to build a new restaurant every day for the next 3 to 4 years in China. They will have 2000 restaurants in China by 2013. The emerging markets are developing a new middle class which works hard and loves to eat fast food. McDonald’s is there for them.

In addition, McDonald’s has discovered that they earn much more from their franchises than they do from running the restaurants themselves. It’s good income with very little work. Out of 32,800 McDonald’s restaurants, 26,400 are franchises (80.6%) and only 26,400 (19.4%) are company owned and operated. The company uses these stores for training and for testing new foods.

According to Simon Baker, the CEO of Baker Avenue Asset Management, multinationals such as McDonald’s stand to benefit from the weakened dollar and make good investments in these volatile markets. By the way, as a bonus McDonald’s pays a 3% dividend which is better than treasury bonds.