In short: Passing mention — with Booking, a travel portal that "may not be quite as necessary when you have an agent that can do it for you."
5:21We'll have multiple agents to be able to extend what we want to do to be able to go out in the world and do things for us. And it's not just shopping for food or groceries or goods and services. It's also booking things, planning trips, booking hotel reservations, going on to booking holdings or Expedia may not be quite as necessary when you have an agent that can do it for you.
In short: Brown's best-stocks "textbook breakout," and the show's most complete case. He first flagged it almost a year ago at 221 (+47% since) and again on 12/29 at 286 (+13%). "The story is very simple — a narrative violation. People looked at the stock this spring and said, yeah, what the hell, throw it in with the SaaS-pocalypse names. But it's not SaaS, it's travel. And travel is the very best slice of consumer spending." Q2: revenue +14% to $4.3B on $34B of gross bookings, "breaking records everywhere you look," the B2B business in its 20th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, full-year guidance raised across the board, and $900M of buybacks year to date under a $5B authorization — "so they're a float shrinker too." The technical plan: "a textbook breakout with a low-volume retest. I guess the retest ended yesterday because today it's off to the races. I think traders should use 290 as their pivot point — below that level it's no longer in a short-term uptrend, you can walk away. Investors give it a little more space: 260, where the rising 50-day sits. Above those levels I think you want to be long the stock." Belsky owns it — bought a year ago in the small/midcap portfolio and again in March in the value portfolio when "it was cheaper than Booking. We love this travel space. We've owned Hilton and Marriott for a long time as well. We think travel's where people are spending their money… this stock is better, actually, fundamentally." Terranova sold it at the end-of-July rebalance and is candid: "the stock looks great, and factoring in the last, let's call it 8 trading days, Josh is right, it's breaking out. I wish we still had it." Sentiment: 45% of analysts have a buy, 329 12-month target.
Josh Brown's favourite kind of setup — what he calls a "narrative violation." Earlier this year investors dumped Expedia along with software stocks, on the theory that AI would destroy subscription software businesses. But Expedia isn't a software company; it's a travel company, "and travel is the very best slice of consumer spending." The stock was cheap because it had been mis-filed.
The business backs it up: quarterly revenue up 14% to $4.3 billion on $34 billion of bookings, the business-to-business division in its twentieth straight quarter of double-digit growth, and full-year guidance raised. It is also buying back its own shares — $900 million so far under a $5 billion authorisation — which steadily shrinks the share count and lifts earnings per share.
His trade plan usefully splits by time horizon. The stock has broken out and quietly retested that breakout on low volume (healthy). Traders should treat $290 as the line: below it, the short-term uptrend is over, walk away. Investors get more room — $260, where the rising 50-day average sits. Brian Belsky owns it in two portfolios (he bought it because it was cheaper than Booking) and pairs it with long-held Hilton and Marriott. And Joe Terranova, who sold it in his July rebalance, watches it break out and admits: "I wish we still had it."
In short: Consumer catches up. Q2 revenue +14% Y/Y to $4.3B (a $150M beat) with adjusted EPS $5.76 ($0.51 beat), gross bookings +12% to roughly $34B "well ahead of expectations" and adjusted EBITDA of $1.1B at a 26% margin. B2B remained the engine — bookings +21% and revenue +23%, its 20th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth — but the news is that consumer finally joined: consumer bookings +8%, including the fastest US growth in 15 quarters, with Vrbo gaining traction as more than 40% of its bookings used partner-funded offers. Demand proved more resilient than feared: APAC rebounded as Middle East disruption eased while Europe stayed pressured by higher airfares and reduced capacity, and "the FIFA World Cup provided only a modest bookings boost, meaning the underlying strength was broader than the event itself." FY26 guidance raised across the board — gross bookings growth to 8–9% (from 6–8%), revenue to 9–10% (from 6–9%) and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion to 150–175 bps (from 100–125 bps). "The turnaround is becoming less dependent on a single engine."
In short: Sold out of Terranova's ETF at the July rebalance — and at a record high today, which he concedes looks odd: "if you pull up a one-year chart you're going to be like, well, what are you talking about? There's great momentum for Expedia." The removal was a quality-rule exit, not a view: "one of the metrics we're using for quality is debt-to-equity. Debt-to-equity can be distorted by a company that does significant buybacks… Expedia's just got uncomfortably high — it's sitting right now at 500%. So that disqualified it, and that's the reason why we sold it." He adds that the rule itself may need revisiting; Lebenthal's suggestion: distinguish debt raised for buybacks (which he hates) from debt raised for productive, cash-generating investment.
Expedia hit a record high on the same day it emerged that Joe Terranova's ETF had just sold it — and the reason is a good illustration of how rules-based investing can override a good chart. His strategy screens for quality using three tests he wrote himself in 2020: revenue growth, return on equity, and debt-to-equity. Expedia's debt-to-equity ratio hit 500%, so it was automatically disqualified.
His own caveat is that the rule may be too blunt: a company that borrows to buy back its own stock shrinks its equity, which mechanically inflates the ratio without necessarily being reckless. "The market is always teaching and you're always learning… there might be something there in the future we'd have to pivot on." Jim Lebenthal's refinement: separate debt raised for buybacks from debt raised for investments that generate cash.
In short: Third of the owned travel names (with Booking and Airbnb) hit initially on international-travel concern — kept within a reasonable downside range rather than sold.
Expedia is the third owned online-travel company (with Booking and Airbnb). Same story: hit initially when investors worried the war would dent international travel.
He groups all three as quality holdings whose war-shock downside he keeps within a reasonable band — held, not trimmed, because the move wasn't extreme enough to act on.
12:34So if there's oil or gas is a key input to a product of a company that we own, what's the negative hit that might be to their earnings and how much downside do we want to risk? You also have, something we noticed, we owned a few of the travel companies like Booking or Airbnb or Expedia.
In short: Black: high-ROE, low-P/E, FCF "cash machine" — Expedia/Hotels.com/Travelocity/Vrbo/Orbitz; Booking+Expedia control 46% of online travel. His own model: $16B revenue, $3.97B EBITDA, $20.04 EPS this year (above Street's $19.77); ex-net-cash P/E 11.7 (14.1 adding back SBC). Excess cash $3.11B last year, $4.56B of buybacks in 2¼ years and ~$1.15B more coming; earnings +17–18% this year and next. Cheaper than Booking by more than its quality gap warrants.
Black's classic value screen — high return on equity, low absolute P/E, gushing free cash — lands on the world's #2 online travel agency (Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz; together with Booking they control 46% of online travel). Strip out the cash on its balance sheet and you're paying under 12 times this year's earnings for a company growing profits 17–18% and buying back stock by the billions. Booking is the better business — but not so much better that it deserves a P/E half again as high.
In short: April partnership lets Uber's 202M MAUs book hotels in-app — "the first tangible step toward a travel super-app" competing structurally with Amazon Prime.
In short: A name to "keep an eye on" as AI disruption shows up in winners-vs-losers and new-high/new-low divergences.
20:26generational shift what we saw in the industrial revolution in the early 1900s where the entire labor force of the agriculture sector was basically wiped out and people had to find jobs in completely different locations. — Yeah, that that's the case. In other words, the question is how fast does it happen? And that's why you want to keep an eye on stocks like Expedia, um stocks like in the transportation, CH Robinson, you've had these, you look at you look at IBM, right? You've had these big elevator shaft moves in certain
In short: The third leg of the saved "travel aggregators" chart, named only as a comparator: "I like to keep track of gross bookings across Expedia, Booking Holdings, and Airbnb and see which ones have grown the fastest… off which base, off which take rate? And they disclose all of these numbers for investors." No view on the stock.
1:05:37This is one where I like to keep track of gross bookings across Expedia, Booking Holdings, and Airbnb and see which ones have grown the fastest. Airbnb has been a company that's starting to look pretty interesting for me. So, I've been doing some more research, and this is one thing that I've really liked looking at, is going, okay, our gross bookings across the aggregators, which one's growing the fastest, off which base, off which take rate? And they disclose all of these numbers for investors. They disclose all of those
In short: Cited as the K-shape "haves" — strong travel demand from wealthy consumers (vs restaurants/REITs "in flames").
Expedia is the online travel agency. Same illustration as Airbnb: it's the "haves" side of the divide, with strong travel demand from wealthy consumers, in contrast to restaurants and property landlords that are "in flames."
Full passage: premium transcript (PDF).
Nothing matches this filter.
Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.