BKNG is a strong hold due to profitable customer float management, high coverage ratios, and aggressive share repurchases that benefit from price declines.

And here I'm talking about Wise and Booking Holdings because these companies hold cash for their customers.

Coming to Booking Holdings, this is different, right? Because people pay in advance when they're booking hotels. They get to keep the cash, and then they're going to pay the hotels after the person has checked out.

So if I paid hotels in September and I'm going to travel in November, for two months Booking Holdings is going to hold the cash, and they earn interest on this cash. They use the cash to repurchase shares. They use the cash to run operations.

Now, you may tell me, how are they using other people's money like this? Because they also borrow. They take debt. But this is long-term debt. They can borrow at lower rates for five years, 10 years from now.

And then they are using the cash that is coming from travelers, from customers, in the short term.

And as long as they have enough cash on the balance sheet to counter the possible cancellations, the possible refunds, it is not going to be an issue. They did this very well in 2020.

And right now—this is my own calculation—I believe that they have 254% of the float covered.

These two companies, Wise and Booking Holdings, are about 50% of my portfolio.

So in the case of Wise and especially Booking Holdings, if the market believes that high interest rates mean stock prices need to go down, Booking Holdings takes the opportunity to repurchase more shares.

Right now, the buyback yield is around 8%. They are repurchasing about 8% of the company in a year. If stock prices go down, maybe that would be 10%. Imagine such a big company repurchasing 10% of itself in a year.

That's how Booking Holdings became a buyback cannibal.