Great Companies, Beaten-Down Stocks: Booking & Pool Corp with Jonathan Boyar

Jonathan Boyar (0:00)

How do you want to split it?

SPEAKER_2 (0:01)

Actually, dinner's on me.

SPEAKER_3 (0:02)

Okay, big money.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

Well, I got a Venmo Balance that I can spend with my Venmo Debit MasterCard, so.

Tobias Carlisle (0:08)

Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kinda on me, actually.

SPEAKER_2 (0:12)

Yeah, you send it, I spend it.

SPEAKER_3 (0:13)

Did my money get, like, reincarnated?

SPEAKER_2 (0:15)

Yeah, it's chicken shawarma. You want it back?

SPEAKER_3 (0:18)

I can't believe you, like, ate my Venmo.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo Debit Card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo Balance, account required to get a card and use a balance. The Venmo Mastercard is issued by the Bancorp Bank NA.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

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Tobias Carlisle (1:00)

We are live. This is Value After Hours. I'm Tobias Carlisle, joined as always by my co-host, Jake Taylor.

Our special guest today is Jonathan Boyar of Boyar Value. How are you, John? Welcome back.

Jonathan Boyar (1:12)

Thank you. It's great to be back.

Tobias Carlisle (1:15)

Tell us very briefly a little bit about Boyar Value.

Jonathan Boyar (1:19)

Sure. We've been around since 1975 We're a research shop where we sell independent research on a subscription basis, utilizing a businessman's approach to stock market investing. Then we utilize that same research and manage money for institutions, family offices, high-net-worth individuals.

We're opportunist investors, we're US-based investors, all-cap, any sector.

Tobias Carlisle (1:47)

Just give us a brief overview of the market as you see it at the moment. There's this very wide bifurcation between the AI adjacent names, which seem to be the vast bulk of the index.

SPEAKER_2 (1:57)

Objection leading the witness.

Tobias Carlisle (1:59)

Holding up the index and everything else is in a quasi bear market, maybe not a technical bear market, but it feels like it's pretty close.

Jonathan Boyar (2:07)

Yeah. I see all the headlines, the people trying to be funny with the bad breath the market has, and it's certainly the case. I mean, we're stock by stock investors, we're finding things that are interesting, but to find things that are interesting, unfortunately, you have to take some pain.

The last couple of months have been a little bit painful, but overall, it's generally been a pretty good year for us, so we're happy with that, but it's definitely, we're living in an AI world, how long we're going to, in terms of the stock market, how long that lasts is anyone's guess, but we're just sticking to our knitting and trying to find situations that are interesting, and then also taking advantage, you and I were talking offline on some of the names that have been sold off due to AI fears. We did that earlier in the year with Salesforce and Microsoft, and now we're doing that with Airbnb and Booking and some other names. So it's creating a lot of opportunity.

Jake Taylor (3:15)

Toby, you want some numbers that I saw recently?

Tobias Carlisle (3:18)

Yeah.

Jake Taylor (3:22)

Fifty-nine percent of constituents in the index are greater than 20 percent below all-time highs.

Forty-one percent are greater than 30 percent below all-time highs. Seventeen percent are 50 percent below all-time highs. So it might be that the crash is here already. It's just not evenly distributed.

Tobias Carlisle (3:44)

Yeah. Feels like we're in a post-singularity world at the moment.

Jonathan Boyar (3:49)

Yeah. Yeah.

Tobias Carlisle (3:52)

Let's talk a little bit about booking because that's one that we've had a previous guest discuss. It's one that I hold as well, full disclosure.

It seems to be impacted by AI or that's the perspective anyway.

Jonathan Boyar (4:09)

Yeah.

I mean, listen, everything is impacted by AI in positive and negative ways. But Muse came out, we're recording this on September 29th, a couple of weeks ago and it hit Airbnb hard, it hit Booking hard. Goldman came out with one of these baskets, which usually are pretty self-serving for their clients. I think it was the Investors Inertia basket, they called it some desk analysts came out with it. It was a one-page report that took away tens of billions of dollars of stock market value, if not hundreds of billions.

Take that for what it's worth. But they're saying something like booking is not going to be necessary. And it's ridiculous. They said Google tried to take it over, not the company, but tried to take the space. They couldn't do it. They have a ton of resources. TripAdvisor tried to do it. They couldn't do it. Booking is competitively advantage and it would be very difficult for someone to replicate what they've done. And what they've done is they've gone to these small and mid-sized like boutique type of hotels and have inventory from them and they make it very profitable for the companies to list on booking.