Ensemble Capital Management, an investment management company, released its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. A copy of the same can be downloaded here. The fund saw exceptionally excellent absolute and relative performance in the fourth quarter. The fund was up 16.00% in the quarter while the S&P 500 appreciated 11.69%. The fund was up 21.75% for the full year vs the S&P 500 up 26.29%. The fund’s underperformance was due to its investment in First Republic, which the fund exited in March. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2023.
Ensemble Capital Management featured stocks such as Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) in the fourth quarter 2023 investor letter. Headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) provides online travel and restaurant booking services. On January 17, 2024, Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) stock closed at $3,489.90 per share. One-month return of Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) was -0.84%, and its shares gained 50.73% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) has a market capitalization of $121.762 billion.
Ensemble Capital Management stated the following regarding Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) (7.60% weight in the Fund): Earlier this year, Booking Holdings rolled out an AI trip planner. Traditionally Booking helps users find the right hotel by offering a search engine to define which city you want to stay in and apply various filters to narrow down the hotel options. With Booking’s AI Trip Planner, a user can use natural language such as “plan a road trip on Route 66, starting in Chicago and ending to Los Angeles.” The Trip Planner then engages with the user like a travel agent, suggesting which cities to stay in each night and various sights to see along the way. Once the trip is planned out, the user can use natural language to generate hotel options, such as by writing “My budget is $200 to $300 a night. It will be my husband and I traveling together.”
Booking’s experiments in AI demonstrate the value of proprietary data sets. While general AI systems such as ChatGPT are designed to answer questions about anything, focused AI systems that leverage a company’s unique data can be far more powerful when applied to specific use cases. With Booking’s AI Trip Planner, the system is unable to answer questions unrelated to making travel reservations. But on the other hand, it is far more likely to understand what the user wants since it already knows that the entire conversation will be about travel. Importantly, Booking’s AI Trip planner has access to the company’s enormous dataset that includes hotel ratings, popular hotels, and all sorts of detailed information about each hotel.”
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Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) is not our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 81 hedge fund portfolios held Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) at the end of third quarter which was 78 in the previous quarter.
We discussed Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) in another article and shared the list of best tech stocks to buy according to billionaire Ken Griffin. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2023 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
