Chit Chat Stocks Sep 25, 2026 1h 4m · 44m saved
With Aria Radnia, individual investor who runs the Quality Investing with Aria YouTube channel and does work for The Motley Fool
Only about 3% of the hotels listed on Booking.com cannot be booked anywhere else, Aria Radnia said. At Airbnb, 70% of listings are unique to the platform.
Much of the market sold travel, payments and delivery stocks together after Meta launched Muse, an AI agent that books and buys on a user's behalf. Radnia sorted them by whether they own their supply: the travel aggregators are exposed, Airbnb, Amazon and Uber's ride business mostly are not, and Google's search business is the one he worries about most.
"And there's a big question mark over these companies, in my opinion."
Aria Radnia, an individual investor who does work for The Motley Fool and runs the Quality Investing with Aria YouTube channel, on Chit Chat Stocks, where he sat in for a regular co-host on the weekly Investing Power Hour livestream. He holds Zeta Global as roughly 12% of his portfolio and sold his Adobe position at a loss the day the company named a new chief executive.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 64 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
Only about 3% of Booking.com's hotels are unique to it, which leaves Booking and Expedia exposed to AI agents that shop around them
Airbnb's figure is 70%, which Radnia said protects it
An AI agent "kind of ruins the economics of search", Radnia said, which he gave as the reason Google has not launched one
Meta can fund free AI agent use "literally forever" from its ad business and earn it back through a take rate on purchases
Amazon blocked Muse and can afford to, because shoppers go straight to it rather than being sent there
Uber Eats advertising is the part of Uber at risk, not rides, where Uber and Lyft are the only choices
Consulting firms became investable after Dario Amodei's essay, Radnia said, because enterprises need someone to blame if an AI agent causes damage
Costco at 43 times earnings is a worse buy than Mastercard at 31 times, in Radnia's view
Executive turnover, not the fundamentals, made him sell Adobe at a 16% loss at $280
CrowdStrike trades at about 50 times sales while growing about 24%, roughly three times slower than the last time it carried that multiple
1. Zeta Can Prove Ad Returns
The host opened with listener questions about Zeta Global, a company he said he knew little about. Radnia owns it and gave the overview.
Zeta is roughly 12% of his portfolio after a quick gain
"At this time, I do own the stock. It is roughly a 12% position in my portfolio, and it's kind of grown into that." — Aria Radnia
He said his cost basis was closer to 8% or 9% of the portfolio, and that he was up "pretty decently" in a handful of months. He pointed listeners to Nick of the Wealthmatica Substack, whom he called the investor leading the Zeta following.
A marketing CRM sold only to the largest companies
"To give you the sort of thousand feet view of what the company does, they're essentially, I like to describe it as a CRM for marketing." — Aria Radnia
A CRM is customer-relationship management software. Zeta has 12 products, he said, one of which is a demand-side platform, the software advertisers use to buy ads, that competes with The Trade Desk.
"They have roughly 400 customers, and these are all like Fortune 2000 companies." — Aria Radnia
He named American Airlines, Delta and, he thought, Ford as clients, along with the holding company behind the UFC and WWE. He will attend the company's Zeta Live event in New York in about two weeks.
Advertisers cut brand campaigns first and keep what they can measure
Radnia said the overlap with The Trade Desk is "very, very slim." Automotive, airlines, consumer packaged goods and retail are in a down cycle and pulling back on advertising, especially brand advertising.
"If you have advertising that you're doing that you can say I'm, you can confidently say, I'm putting down a dollar here and I'm getting back three. That is the last thing in a down cycle that you are going to cut back on." — Aria Radnia
"And so Zeta can prove that return on ad spend, but on the flip side, a trade desk, on the other hand, historically has done more brand advertising." — Aria Radnia
The host, reading from Fiscal.ai, said Zeta's five-year revenue growth is 30%.
