taylor: some decent buying into the last couple hours of the closing bell leads to a good left. green on the screen on these equity markets. 1.6% on the s&p. big outperformance when it comes to technology. out of inverted territory, still about one basis point or so. further out on the yield curve it is pricing in further that inflationary data that we see.

stay-at-home trades versus reopening trades and what that means. that was the markets wrap. caroline: going to talk about the reopening trade seemingly playing out in late u.s. trade. roblox seeing shares fall. airbnb benefiting from you and i getting back out and traveling again, getting experiences, seeing shares pop. we break down how executives will play this recovery that is still staring inflation and a hawkish fed in the face. romaine: they are not bad for either company. airbnb you talk about gross bookings up about 90%-plus on a year-over-year basis. roblox was up about 20%. i guess were some concern came

in was with roblox a number of daily active users came in a little light in the fourth quarter, although the company did provide a figure for january, and that showed potential celebration. with airbnb it is all about this idea that we are all back out and traveling and looking for places to stay. airbnb benefited during the pandemic and a lot of people think it will benefit post-pandemic. the question is for roblox, well, everyone was inside playing that game independent. once we are all out traveling, are we going to be playing roblox? taylor: maybe ed ludlow can help us answer that question. because we bring up this good point that there is always this push and poultry it pit what stood out to me in the airbnb press release is they say guests are planning more travel despite variants and all these covid variants urges, and they are not just traveling, they are living on airbnb as well. ed: yeah. this is a lot of pressure to answer that. the beat was strong and we knew going into this that the street

wanted not just wrong beats but strong outlooks. reading between the lines, airbnb is saying they have a product for everyone. that there is still a large stay-at-home crowd, there are people that are still hunkered down in airbnb is outside of urban areas across the country. they are benefiting in that business area. they are also doing well for those who are starting to travel for recreational and vacation purposes. they had a strong outlook for the first quarter despite the omicron variant overhang. this is a company that in the same time a year ago lost $4 billion. they also eked out a pretty income -- a pretty interesting net income. caroline: we are starting to see a company that perhaps can talk to us about clarity, about growth. what about higher rates in particular? what about this as a company as a technology business? ed: that is why i bring out the loss a year ago. if you compare airbnb to say, expedia or booking.com, this is

a stock that has traded at a discount to those competitors this year, because it also trades at a higher multiple. it is sensitive to the narrative around higher rates and higher multiple stocks. the after-hours reaction here in the share prices is pretty strong. that speaks to the idea that the street wants to know what the growth outlook is, not just that they were able to fare well in a quarter where there were difficulties because of the pandemic, but it looks like the growth trajectory is still strong for this company. romaine: i want to go back to roblox. ed: me too. romaine: we had bloomberg intelligence on earlier, mandeep. he pointed out some short-term numbers, there is a longer-term play here, bet on the metaverse or whatever and ciliary's are attached. i am curious if anything was in the numbers that would dissuade anyone that roblox will be a big part of the metaverse. ed: yes, this is the question i heard you say in the intro about the active user number. the number that caught my eye

was the hours engaged. 10.8 billion hours engaged, growth 28% year on year, but essentially they are not getting people who are already on the platform using it for the same amount of time. back in november when peloton had his fiscal fourth-quarter numbers, and they were saying our existing user base is not using the product as much. this seems to be the alarm bell that roblox is signaling. right now does not just growing users, the existing users are just doing other things. romaine: that is the whole point of the show, this idea that has to be a balance. if we are going out to eat or to travel, you are not necessarily going to have as much time to do other things like pedal a bike indoors or play a videogame. ed: but these are year our year -- year on your comparisons. this company saw enormous growth because we were all at home. not us, younger users. these are kids flocking to the

platform, although the age of users is apparently going up. executives are saying bear with us. this is a long-term investment you should be making in roblox because the metaverse is distant but we are coming from a very high bar. romaine: you are our chief gen z correspondent, giving us a breakdown there. this conversation is about that proverbial reopening trade and whether the stay-at-home stocks we have all grown to love over the last couple years, whether they should fall out of favor. liz ann sonders is chief investment strategist at charles schwab joining us. i don't know how much of a roblox player you are. liz ann: no, i don't do anything. romaine: if you are going out to eat or travel or whatever adults do these days, you have a lot less time to do some stuff we did on doors such as watch netflix, play roblox, ride your peloton.

is there a case to be made for some of these stay-at-home stocks, that after covid they can actually really grow post-covid? liz ann: i think the case that should be made is that they are not a monolith. one of the stark differences this year that we have seen, even among the big five or the super seven, the largest names, is you are seeing really divergent performance. the vergence in performance is very much tied to the fundamental. so i do not think we can consider whether it is the reopening stocks for the faang stocks or the super seven, whatever categorization you use. i do not think we can view them with a monolithic lens anymore. i think the overarching theme to even within groups like that in terms of what is working and what is not working, has to do with the combination of value. lowercase v, the characteristic of value. even in growth year segments of the market.

the stocks have screened better on pre-cash flow yield. and real earnings yield. even dividend yield. even within a sector like tech, performing well. i think that is more about what is going on. it is kind of a risk-on day today, but i do not think we can lump all of these stocks in together in that thematic narrative way we did the past two years. taylor: i know we do not want to get into some individual stocks as well but broadly thinking, as you are think about the bets these companies are taking, big tech is taking, roblox today really saying the metaverse is the future. facebook changed its name to meta. everyone is betting on this. what if it is not what it turned out to be? what is the risk that these companies are banking future growth, if we do not necessarily know what that looks like? liz ann: to be purposely honest, i have no idea. i figuratively fly around at the 30,000 foot level.

i do not do any work on any individual companies. in general when we are in earnings season, i am certainly keenly aware of the general trend. but i think with any company where there is sort of a significant bet, a bet o -- a capex bet on something not in full operation right now, sure, that's absolutely a risk. but i do not have any particular expertise on what is being planned in terms of the metaverse, and which companies are most leveraged to it and where there might be risks. it is just not my area. caroline: where you do have ex were teases where we put our money when rates start to go higher, what we do in the face of a fed tightening, when we try to use a monolithic term, about value, then none of us know what value means anymore. when people are saying get into cyclicals, out of defensive's, what do they mean? what should you be placing your

bets on as we see the world turn? liz ann: so, i'll emphasize again what i call the difference between lowercase v value and i v -- and uppercase v value. i am not talking about the s&p value index or the russell 1000 or 2000 index. i am talking about the characteristic of value. a perfect example actually, you can go back 20 years and look at when the market bottomed in october of 2002. if you are a deep value investor, you did not want to limit yourself to the value index is because a lot of that deep value is actually found in the tech stocks that have gotten beaten up. most of watch -- which were still housed in growth indexes, but that is where you found value. there can be times like recently, utilities returning a

multiple higher than the s&p. yes, they live in the value in excess, but that is not value. the value family -- it's been more consistent than leadership at the sector level, cyclical versus defensive, at the reopening versus stay-at-home, and i think that will continue. that lowercase v value with a quality wrapper around it, i think that is the focus investor should have right now. and in an environment where there is greater dispersion, you are seeing it manifest itself in active doing better than passive an equal way to doing better than cap wait. there's an opportunity here for active investors to finally have a little bit of an edge relative to the playing field that was so biased towards passive for so many years. romaine: you have been in this business for a long time, i am curious if you can give us a comparison as to how you see this current state of whatever market cycle we are in, compared

with previous cycles where maybe things were a little bit more homogenous. use all the more herding, more crowd mentality. there seems to be more dispersion right now, at least in right now. liz ann: i think a lot of that is a function of cutting tighter monetary policy. the point at which the fed started tapering the balance sheet was really when you started to see the shift in the flavor of the market with greater dispersion anda bit more discernment on the part of investments -- investors. some of the higher valued areas, longer duration segments started to take it on the chin. it was also the point in which some speculative froth which has been heavily concentrated down the quality spectrum, be it meme stocks or heavily weighted stocks, nonprofitable tech. so we're in that environment where as you move towards monetary policy normalization, you start to see the hits. more on those longer duration,

higher valuation segments of the market. and i think those are the comparable periods where you go from very loose to tighter policy, as the fed is looking to launch the strategy. caroline: liz ann sonders, we love the perspective. thank you. stay well. we're going to get insight on the rebound from the travel industry. the going to be talking with the found men -- with the founder and chairman of the luxury company montage. going to be making you want to book all your vacations. this is a story of whether we really are going out. this is bloomberg. ♪ ♪

romaine: today's triple take is focused on stay-at-home versus reopening stocks. which one do you bet on? i am told a lot of people travel. taylor travels every week. but for the rest of us, apparently we are all getting back out and traveling and people are betting that hotels and airlines, maybe that is where you put your money. caroline: slowly but surely we are coming around to the rigg s way of doing things. 559 flights from jfk currently. we are almost at the 2019 average. look where we are starting to meet up. l.a. climbing up on the number. the u.k. is well behind, almost half. it really shows how asia is lagging. look at the number for hong kong, 126 vs. 540. there's clear disparity. domestic flights is where it is at. taylor: maybe this highlights

how easy it is to fly domestically but we are not yet there internationally. less get more insight into this with alan fuerstman, founder, chairman, and ceo of montage international. what are you seeing? we talk about the numbers from marriott, airbnb highlighting this recovery. are consumers out they are spending and traveling with your brand? alan: very much so. we are seeing great strength in the domestic markets, of which we are primarily. especially in the resort segment and especially luxury. we've been very fortunate to be in that space. once the vaccines and the boosters came about, there was so much pent up demand that we've seen terrific, record years and almost all of our resorts. and we expect that to continue. romaine: with regards to some of the travel trends, alan, are we

talking about folks who are gravitating more towards the resort side of your portfolio, or some of the names that are in more urban areas, like downtown chicago. is there any disparity in what people are gravitating to? alan: there is a huge disparity. individual travel came back ahead of group travel. so markets that rely on conventions business, chicago is a good example there, but the convention business has not returned yet. we expect it to return this year and that will help drive the business needed in that market. but we've seen our domestic hotels on the leisure side really excel business levels. business travel was very limited, so much of that travel was americans rediscovering america. that's been a big beneficiary.

south carolina sawn explosion of business from people discovering a part of the country or a destination they may not have been to before. caroline: it reminds me, everyone is traveling, but to the office. so people are back out there. i'm interested in your perspective a lot of -- of what happens if americans are able to go into other countries but there still a limitation of people coming into the u.s. do you worry about that? how do you picture asian travel coming back to the united states? alan: i think it will come back and we will see the group business coming back, so the small meetings that were on hold for a while, that business is due to return. that will offset some of the outbound traffic. but we're very confident that the experiences our -- our consumers had this year discovering hotels will lead to

repeat business. they will be so much more exposure to our hotels domestically that we expect the future to be quite bright. taylor: how are you managing a very tight labor market with rising labor and wage costs? alan: that has been a huge challenge. obviously when the pandemic first hit, it was quite a few of our associates in our industry that sought other kinds of work. it is coming back, but it is the biggest challenge we currently face. we have opened six hotels in the past 15 months and we relied upon some markets to support other markets. we opened in big sky, montana and drew throughout the country to support the opening where it was a tighter labor market. we have to be flexible. obviously labor is the key to luxury service, it is our primary focus and we need to continue to get creative in finding the talent. it's an amazing industry to work

in, and i feel you will see a resurgence of people coming back now that things are stabilizing. caroline: i am interested to that end, i have just been away, stayed in what would have been a pretty nice hotel, but the service was laughable. what can rectify that? is it immigration visa get easier? how are you -- needs? ? to get easier --is it immigration that needs to get easier? alan: there really is no excuse for a lack of service. it's a priority that all hotels have to deal with. it's going to separate those truly luxurious properties that can staff and come up with the means to do that. luxury is not a commodity. as long as service levels

continue to be at the highest levels, those are the properties in the hotels and the brands that will excel. taylor: we appreciate your insight and perspective. alan fuerstman. we will be back with our final take next. and we do have lots of takes on the travel segment of this. this is bloomberg. ♪ is bloomberg. ♪

romaine: today's triple take was all about, well, the reopening trade and the stay-at-home trade. which side are you on? caroline: reopening. taylor: ditto. romaine: i kind of like the stay-at-home thing for a while. if you are antisocial like me, this is bliss. taylor: it is great to have a

built-in excuse to never go out, but alas. caroline: you still need to socialize in the metaverse. roblox is still a social occupation. romaine: the metaverse seems a bit iffy right now. they still have to do some issues, making sure they police it so it is a safe space. taylor: there is a great point earlier about bringing in advertisements to boost engagement we have seen with other social media companies. caroline: you are going to get metaverse crossing over with reality and get airbnb advertising on the metaverse. airbnb currently popping. also doing experiences. a lot of that was virtual during lockdown. the company that could weather both sides. romaine: liz ann sonders made a great point that maybe we are oversimplifying this, parsing things out into separate areas. but we know that is what investors tend to do. some of the stay-at-home trades,

they are obviously going to do well post-pandemic. they set up an ecosystem that stands the test of time. how much did you bet on the super bowl? taylor: i don't gamble. romaine: sure. caroline: she is so clean. this is bloomberg. ♪

>> from the heart of where innovation, money, and power collide, in silicon valley and beyond, this is "bloomberg technology" with emily chang. emily: i'm emily chang in san francisco and this is "bloomberg technology." airbnb is beating its own pre-pandemic records despite omicron dragging on. we will explore travel rebound and fourth-quarter results.