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Soros Favorite Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG) Is Leading the Travel Industry in 2024

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Soros Favorite Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG) Is Leading the Travel Industry in 2024

We recently published a list of George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) stands in the list of George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024.

George Soros is one of the biggest investors, businessmen, and philanthropists. Soros currently has a net worth of $7.2 billion, as of October 4, according to Forbes. The legendary billionaire investor managed client money between 1969 and 2011. Soros made a fortune after shorting the British pound in 1992, making $1 billion. He has donated over $32 billion to his philanthropic organization, Open Society, of which almost $15 billion has been distributed. You can also read our piece on the best growth stocks to buy according to George Soros.

Soros is the author of multiple books including the very popular The Alchemy of Finance, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means. He last wrote a book in 2019 named In Defense of Open Society. The book is a collection of Soros’ writings on various topics including artificial intelligence, machine learning, political philanthropy, and financial markets.

Soros’ View on Artificial Intelligence

According to Soros, AI poses a threat to democracies especially with its extensive surveillance capabilities. He suggests that to distinguish between right and wrong humans must strike a balance between understanding reality and assessing how to change the world in our favor. Artificial intelligence destroys the very essence of reality, creating a disbalance. Soros emphasizes the need for AI to be regulated but for these regulations to work, societies from across the globe must work together. He also added that in an ideal world, standard regulations may have been possible but our countries our run on two distinct ideologies, the open and closed society. Here is what Soros stated:

“AI destroyed this simple schema because it has absolutely nothing to do with reality. AI creates its own reality and when that artificial reality fails to correspond to the real world –which happens quite often — it is discarded as hallucination. This made me almost instinctively opposed to AI and I wholeheartedly agree with the experts who argue that it needs to be regulated. But AI regulations have to be globally enforceable, because the incentive to cheat is too great; those who evade the regulations gain an unfair advantage.”

Adding to this, he suggests that while AI may make closed societies more powerful it may pose a threat to open societies. In addition to that, Soros suggested that repressive regimes like China and Russia are benefitting from the incidence of AI and thus are able to garner greater control over less powerful nations. His primary concern around AI and technology is surveillance and the misuse of data. Soros said the following about the future of AI:

“AI is developing incredibly fast, and it is impossible for ordinary human intelligence to fully understand it. Nobody can predict where it will take us. But we can be sure of one thing: AI helps closed societies and poses a mortal threat to open societies. That’s because AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help closed societies to surveil their subjects.”

A Deep Understanding of Soros’s Investment Philosophy 

Soros founded the Soros Fund Management LLC, a private investment management firm in 1970. He is known for his contrarian investing philosophy and has made fortunes for himself and investors through his strategies. His hedge fund is based on the idea of making elaborate one-way bets on currency movements, commodity prices, stocks, bonds, and any assets driven by macroeconomic conditions.

Soros is known to have let macroeconomic conditions shape his investment decisions. This is a crucial aspect of his trading strategy referred to as reflexivity. This strategy defies standard economic conditions and emphasizes that market participants have the power to influence market fundamentals, and consequently the financial market. In light of his contrarian investment philosophy, Soros said the following in his book, Staying Ahead of the Curve:

“The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. … I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.”

Now that we have studied one of Soros’s most important investment philosophies, let’s take a look at the top 10 holdings of George Soros.

Our Methodology

We sifted through Soros Fund Management’s Q2 2024 13F filings and picked the fund’s top 10 picks. The stocks are ranked in ascending order of the fund’s stakes in them. We have also mentioned the hedge fund sentiment around each stock.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG): Leading the Travel Industry in 2024

Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG): Leading the Travel Industry in 2024

A fast-paced travel agent making a bookings for a family vacation package.

Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)

Soros Fund Management’s Stake Value: $64.72 Million

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 96

Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) ranks eighth on our list of George Soros’s top 10 holdings. The online travel company offers a platform where users can make travel reservations, accommodation reservations, rent cars, and buy vacation packages. The holdings company runs multiple subsidiaries, including Agoda, Booking.com, Priceline.com, and Kayak, among others.

The company provides services in more than 220 countries and is available in more than 40 languages. For the year ended 2023, Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) logged $150.6 billion in travel bookings, up 24% year over year. In addition to that, over 1 billion room nights were booked across all platforms.

In the second quarter of 2024, the company booked over 287 million room nights across all platforms and logged revenue worth $5.9 billion, both up by 7% year-over-year. Air bookings on the other hand increased by 28% year-over-year. The company’s competitive edge is its strong travel ecosystem that offers a complete travel package all under the same roof. Such explains why Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) facilitated 28 million reported accommodation listings, including 6.6 million homes and apartments, in 2023.

Wedgewood Partners stated the following regarding Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:

“Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) contributed to performance as travel spending across the U.S. and Europe remains quite healthy, whereas the Company took share in alternative accommodations, and looks set to expand margins after a few years of reinvestment. The Company has also been aggressively reducing its share count at reasonably attractive valuation multiples. Booking should be able to compound earnings at an attractive, double-digit rate for the next few years given these various initiatives.”

Overall, BKNG ranks 8th on our list of George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024. Overall, BKNG ranks first among the top 10 holdings of George Soros. While we acknowledge the potential of healthcare companies, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than BKNG but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: $30 Trillion Opportunity: 15 Best Humanoid Robot Stocks to Buy According to Morgan Stanley and Jim Cramer Says NVIDIA ‘Has Become A Wasteland’.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.

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