• Booking.com thesis (excellent overview) – [the 10th man BKNG thesis]
    • I concur the valuation is compelling but I think this is borderline too hard. In my mind there is a >70% probability BKNG stock is a home run. In the other case, BKNG loses its edge relatively quickly (measured in years while it trades around 20X earnings) as Google keeps innovating & lowering the user friction to book directly with hotels (or any other OTA bidder, aka make the bidding process for ads in the Hotel Module – which is one giant & very user-friendly meta search ad – much more competitive & hence expensive for BKNG). If the user experience becomes better (and hence the search process for hotels and travel starts) on Google, then the legacy moat of BKNG is in trouble. The post does not elaborate on potential further Google innovations such as Google Assistant sorting out a booking with a direct AI phone call to hotels, passing on the parameters the user was looking for originally (hence lowering friction to book directly & getting a birds’ eye view on). Stratechery [The Google Squeeze] focused more on the latest innovation at least.
    • Google makes available a direct booking API for larger chains to easily plug into. That will increasingly happen to smaller hotels too. BKNG has painful take rates of 15% on hotel revenue

Google Hotel Module is making auctions for customer attention more competitive. As the real estate of mobile phone is limited, competitors get only one shot for attention in this superior meta search tool. The highest bidder is featured on top.

  • Druckenmiller 2020 Outlook [Bloomberg]
    • general takeaway: long equities, commodities (though not energy), short long duration fixed income (he is basically long inflation)
      • maybe not read too much into it as he reverses positions frequently
    • last takeaway: bull on UK domestic economy: “never underestimate the common sense of the British people” – Thatcher via Druckenmiller. Stan is a brexiteer, biggest FX long is GBP & says UK domestic stocks are at low multiples.
  • Peter Lynch in [Barron’s ]