Robinhood stocks are the shares most widely held among brokerage accounts with Robinhood Markets. The trading platform provides a list of the top 100 for all to see. And two stocks in the top 100 list are Airbnb (ABNB -3.18%) and Zoom Video Communications (ZM -0.82%).
The user base on Robinhood skews younger and is often criticized by investors with more experience. However, I applaud a trait I've observed with these more novice investors: Robinhood investors tend to stick with stocks even when they're down. Take Airbnb and Zoom as prime examples. These two stocks are off 47% and 79%, respectively, from their all-time highs. And yet they remain among the top-100-held stocks on Robinhood.
Holding or adding to losing companies is a disastrous long-term strategy. But holding good companies through market volatility is necessary for all successful buy-and-hold investors. In my opinion, Airbnb and Zoom are such companies, worthy of a continued place in a diversified portfolio. Here's why.
Image source: Getty Images.
A strategy to keep users on Airbnb
On May 11, Airbnb announced what it called its "biggest change in a decade," which is a bold statement for a company that's upended the travel industry over the past ten years. Among the platform improvements are enhanced abilities to search by categories like "national parks" and "historical homes." And guests can now split their stays between multiple locations in a single booking.
However, I believe Airbnb's more significant change is called "AirCover for guests." The company already enjoys top-of-mind brand power that's a competitive advantage for getting users. But Airbnb needs to also be better than its competitors in order to keep users. And AirCover might be a way it can accomplish this.
Airbnb already launched AirCover for hosts last year. In addition to offering them up to $1 million in liability insurance -- as it has always done -- it's broadened that to include things like protecting lost host income if they have to cancel bookings to repair damages from previous guests. Offering things like this is crucial for keeping hosts loyal to Airbnb's platform.
Now Airbnb offers AirCover for guests as well. If your host cancels on you, you're covered. If you feel unsafe, call the safety hotline. And if you don't get exactly what you booked, Airbnb will put you up somewhere else. All of these features are free and could motivate a user to choose to book through Airbnb's platform.
In the first quarter of 2022, Airbnb processed over $17 billion in gross booking value -- the total value of nights and experiences booked on its platform. This was a 67% increase from last year and suggests Airbnb is in for a strong year of adoption. And with new features aimed to please both guests and hosts, I believe Airbnb is positioning itself to keep what it's gained so far for years to come.
Image source: Zoom Video Communications.
Key metrics suggest ongoing adoption for Zoom
We can argue all day about whether Zoom stock was overvalued when it traded for over $400 per share in 2020. But here's something less debatable: shares of the video conferencing platform are cheaply valued now, trading at under 20 times trailing earnings. The reason it trades at its cheapest valuation ever is because the market believes its days as a growth company are completely over.
Zoom's financial guidance for this year supports this negative outlook. Management is guiding for full-year revenue of $4.54 billion at the midpoint of guidance, which is only a 10.7% year-over-year increase.
However, keep in mind that ongoing double-digit top-line growth is impressive considering how much growth Zoom has experienced over the past two years. Moreover, additional business metrics suggest the company's business is stronger than ever.
For starters, Zoom keeps winning more customers. At the end of the third quarter of its fiscal 2022, the company had 2,507 customers spending $100,000 or more annually. By the fourth quarter, it had 2,725.
Additionally, Zoom's backlog of business has never been better. At the end of fiscal 2022, the company had over $2.6 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO), up 51% year over year. Importantly, this was 7.8% quarter-over-quarter RPO growth, outpacing the 1.9% quarter-over-quarter increase in revenue. In other words, the backlog has recently grown faster than revenue, suggesting its future prospects are still strong.
Driving ongoing growth for Zoom are new products and services. Specifically, the company wants the "contact-center" space -- providing cloud-based call-center services for businesses. This market is expected to be worth $18 billion by 2024. Zoom failed to acquire Five9 previously but is now moving on with its own offering. And it acquired a small company called Solvvy to help get its new product off the ground.
What about today's market?
Investing legend Charlie Munger says, "I want to swim as well as I can against the tides. I'm not trying to predict the tides."
Munger's point is that timing market sentiment isn't a worthwhile endeavor. But if you're buying stocks where the business can perform well over a long period of time and you hold over that long period of time, then gyrations in market conditions wane in significance.
Airbnb and Zoom could trade lower in the future than they do today. But these businesses indeed look strong to me. And so hats off to you, Robinhood investors. Keep holding these two for the long term.
