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Booking vs. Royal Caribbean – Two Travel Giants, Two Different Journeys

By MPI29th October 2025StocksBooking, investing, Royal Caribbean, stocks

Booking vs. Royal Caribbean: Two Travel Giants, Two Different Journeys

Published October 29, 2025 · My Passive Income

Two of the biggest names in global travel just reported results. While Booking Holdings (Nasdaq:BKNG) continues to climb on the strength of digital travel demand, Royal Caribbean (Nasdaq:RCL) finds itself navigating choppier waters, pressured by higher costs and softer pricing. Here’s how both players are positioned going into the final stretch of 2025 — and into 2026.

Booking Holdings: Flying Smoothly Above Expectations

Booking Holdings once again delivered a strong quarter, reinforcing the idea that travel demand remains resilient. The company beat expectations across key metrics and showed that global consumers are still prioritizing travel spending, even in an uncertain macro environment.

Headline results (Q3 2025):

Adjusted EPS: $99.50 (above FactSet estimate of $95.85)
Net profit: $2.75 billion, +9% vs. Q3 2024
Revenue: $9.01 billion, +13% YoY (estimate: $8.73 billion)
Gross bookings: $49.7 billion, +14% YoY (estimate: $48 billion)
Nights booked: 323 million, +8% YoY (vs. ~6% expected)

Q4 2025 outlook:

+4–6% growth in nights booked
+11–13% growth in total gross bookings
+10–12% revenue growth (slightly below analyst forecasts)

“Despite ongoing macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, we’re pleased to see positive momentum, with steady travel demand so far in the fourth quarter,” the company said.

Stock snapshot:

+4.8% after-hours reaction
+2.6% YTD (still trailing the S&P 500)
Market cap: $165.96B
Forward P/E: 23.5× (vs. sector median ~17.7×)

What the analysts see: Booking continues to post impressive top-line expansion, with ~17.6% annualized revenue growth over the last three years. That said, the forward view is more measured: consensus expects revenue growth of just ~8.3% in the next 12 months. Translation: investors are paying a premium multiple for a company that is still growing — but not at “hypergrowth” levels anymore.

Royal Caribbean: Sailing Through Choppy Waters

For Royal Caribbean, the story is more complicated. Demand is strong, bookings are healthy, and 2026 looks promising. But short-term pressure from costs and pricing is starting to worry investors.

Headline results (Q3 2025):

Adjusted EPS: $5.75 (slightly above estimates)
Revenue: $5.14B (below $5.17B expected)
Ticket revenue: $3.64B (+3.4% vs. 2024)
Onboard & other revenue: $1.5B (+6% YoY; in line with expectations)
Advance onboard bookings: ~50%, with ~90% of those bookings done digitally

Cost pressures:

Net cruise cost per available day (ex-fuel): +4.8%
Higher fuel and maintenance costs
Normalizing ticket prices after a post-pandemic boom
Investor concerns about cash flow and future capex plans

Forward guidance:

Q4 2025 EPS forecast: $2.74–$2.79
Full-year 2025 guidance: $15.58–$15.63 per share
2026 outlook: “We expect EPS starting with a 17,” said the CEO

Royal Caribbean is also leaning heavily on product pipeline and differentiated experiences:

Record expected occupancy in 2026
New flagship demand from Star of the Seas and Celebrity Xcel
Strong interest in Royal Beach Club Paradise Island
Celebrity River itineraries nearly sold out immediately after launch

Stock snapshot:

-12% in pre-market trading after the report
Selloff driven mainly by margin fears, not demand fears

The message from the market is clear: demand alone isn’t enough anymore. Investors now want proof that cruise operators can protect margins, manage fuel and maintenance costs, and generate cash while still investing in new ships and destinations.

Two Travel Stories, One Sector in Motion

Looking at Booking and Royal Caribbean side by side gives us a snapshot of the wider travel industry in late 2025:

Booking Holdings: an asset-light, digital marketplace that scales globally with relatively low incremental cost per booking.
Royal Caribbean: a capital-intensive operator with physical assets, higher fixed costs, and direct exposure to fuel, labor, and maintenance inflation.

Both benefit from the same macro driver: consumers still prioritize experiences, travel, and leisure time. But the way that demand turns into profit is very different.

Booking is being rewarded for efficient growth, strong margins, and visibility into future bookings.
Royal Caribbean is being punished not for lack of demand — demand looks excellent — but for rising costs and worries about how sustainable current pricing really is.

Quick Takeaway

Booking Holdings: still in control, still highly profitable, still scaling. The market is paying a premium multiple for that clarity.
Royal Caribbean: healthy booking pipeline and record occupancy in sight, but investors are asking: at what cost to margins and cash flow?

IBM’s Mixed Quarter: Strong Results, Slower Cloud Growth, and a Quantum Future

By MPI27th October 2025StocksAI, AMD, hybrid cloud, IBM, multi-cloud, Quantum computing, Red Hat

IBM’s Mixed Quarter: Strong Earnings, Slower Cloud Growth, and a Quantum Future

Published October 27, 2025 · My Passive Income

IBM delivered better-than-expected revenue and profit, yet the stock fell sharply as investors questioned the growth trajectory of its hybrid cloud and AI strategy. At the same time, the company is quietly positioning itself for something even bigger: quantum leadership and national-level strategic relevance.

IBM Stock Drops Despite Beating Expectations

At Thursday’s U.S. market open, IBM shares fell more than 7%. The reaction looked harsh given that IBM actually beat Wall Street forecasts on both revenue and earnings — but the headline numbers weren’t the problem. The concern was momentum.

Quarterly revenue: $16.33 billion (+9% year-over-year), ahead of the $16.09 billion consensus.

Adjusted EPS: $2.65 per share, beating expectations of $2.45.

Hybrid cloud revenue: +14% growth, versus +16% last quarter, and below what the market wanted to see — especially in Red Hat, IBM’s core bet on hybrid cloud and enterprise AI.

For many investors, that slowdown is the real story. Hybrid cloud and Red Hat are supposed to be IBM’s high-growth engines. Any deceleration there raises questions about how fully IBM can monetize demand for AI and cloud services going forward.

Inside the Business Segments

IBM’s latest report shows a company with multiple engines running at different speeds:

Software: $7.2 billion (+10%), broadly in line with expectations. This includes Red Hat and AI-aligned offerings.
Infrastructure: $3.56 billion (+17%), ahead of the ~$3.46 billion estimate, powered by demand for IBM Z mainframes.
Consulting: $5.3 billion (+3%), showing steadier, lower growth.

One number IBM really wants investors to notice: its “AI book of business.” That pipeline now exceeds $9.5 billion, up from about $7.5 billion reported in July. Roughly 80% of those AI contracts come from consulting work, with the rest from software. Even more interesting: around 80% of the ~300 AI customers IBM is currently working with are new clients onboarded in just the last two quarters. That signals accelerating enterprise appetite for AI deployment services — and IBM still has deep credibility in regulated, complex industries.

Free Cash Flow and the HashiCorp Deal

Under the surface, IBM remains financially sturdy. The company is targeting roughly $14 billion in free cash flow for 2025, giving it room to invest and acquire. One of the most important recent strategic moves: the $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation specialist. IBM announced the deal at $35 per share in cash and has moved forward with integration.

The logic behind the acquisition is straightforward: HashiCorp’s tooling (Terraform, Vault, etc.) helps large enterprises automate and secure hybrid and multi-cloud environments — exactly where IBM wants to lead, alongside Red Hat and its watsonx AI platform. IBM completed the HashiCorp acquisition after clearing U.S. and U.K. regulatory review, and now positions HashiCorp as a core building block of its end-to-end hybrid cloud and AI stack.

Evercore ISI’s view: “M&A remains an underappreciated lever for IBM’s future growth,” supported by the company’s strong balance sheet and cash generation.

IBM’s Quantum Ambition: The Next “ChatGPT Moment”?

In April, the Wall Street Journal argued that now that IBM has emerged from “a long stretch of mediocrity,” it needs to prove itself in AI. But some investors believe the real breakout moment won’t be AI at all — it will be quantum computing.

IBM has spent years positioning itself as a leader in building universal quantum computing systems. The company has publicly stated plans to launch a large-scale quantum computer by 2029. That long-term vision isn’t just marketing: when investors were reminded of IBM’s quantum roadmap, the stock jumped about 8% in a single session and touched a new all-time high. (This rally followed headlines linking IBM’s quantum error-correction research to AMD hardware.)

Reuters recently reported that IBM has successfully run a quantum error-correction algorithm on AMD’s FPGA chips — a milestone later confirmed to CNBC by an IBM spokesperson. In parallel, Google announced that one of its in-house quantum systems can run certain workloads up to 13,000× faster than classical supercomputers, reinforcing the idea that quantum is transitioning from science fiction to industrial capability.

Quantum Computing Is Now Geopolitical

The race to dominate quantum computing isn’t just commercial anymore — it’s strategic. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. government is exploring direct federal stakes in quantum companies such as IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum, each seeking at least $10 million in backing. Other firms, including Atom Computing, are reportedly open to similar structures.

While the U.S. Department of Commerce has officially denied that negotiations are active, sources cited in those reports claim talks are already in advanced stages. The idea fits into a broader U.S. strategy: securing influence in “critical” technologies that have national security implications, not just commercial upside.

There’s precedent. The U.S. has recently taken partial stakes in areas seen as strategically vital — including a reported 15% position in rare-earth producer MP Materials and around 10% in Intel to support domestic semiconductor production. Quantum could be next in line.

Why the urgency? China is estimated to be investing roughly 2× more than the United States in quantum computing, according to the Quantum Economic Development Consortium. The message from Washington is simple: quantum is no longer optional. It’s infrastructure.

Who’s steering this? Reportedly, U.S. Deputy Commerce Secretary Paul Dabbar — who previously co-founded Bohr Quantum Technology — has been involved in discussions. That’s a sign the U.S. views quantum computing as both a growth engine and a national security lever.

So Where Does That Leave IBM?

IBM sits at the crossroads of three defining tech frontiers:

Hybrid cloud & Red Hat — still strategic, but now under scrutiny due to slowing growth.
Enterprise AI services — a $9.5B+ pipeline, mostly consulting-driven, with a surge of new clients in just two quarters.
Quantum computing — a moonshot that could reshape entire industries, from drug discovery to materials science, and may attract direct government backing.

Investors punished the stock for softer momentum in hybrid cloud, but long-term, IBM is trying to prove it’s no longer just a legacy mainframe company. It wants to be the infrastructure layer for the next era: AI at scale, automated multi-cloud, and commercially viable quantum.

That’s not a short-term trade. That’s a strategy for the next decade.

10 tips for start-up investors on the capital market

By MPI12th July 2017Stockscapital market, investor, money, personal finance, smart, tips

If we want to invest in the capital market, it is very important to have patience and not to act on emotional impulses.
We need to control our emotions and not let ourselves be influenced by the subjective aspects when trading on the stock market.
Greed and fear are the biggest enemies of investors. If you’ve decided to sell a title at a 25% profit, respect that threshold because otherwise it’s possible to lower your profit as a result of further corrections. And the mutual is true, if you have set a loss of 15%, do it, otherwise it is possible to record a larger loss.

10 tips for start-up investors on the capital market:

1. Do not invest in the stock market the money you need right away. Do not plan what to do with the money you will earn from your stock investments, because the stock market is unpredictable, and no matter how much experience you have or how many growth signals you may notice, the market may contradict you and fall.
It is not advisable to invest in the money programmed for important events such as schooling, medical interventions or other projects, because you may have less pleasant surprises.
It is recommended to invest in the amount of money that you may be deprived of for a period of time. It is said to “forget” about the money invested in the stock exchange. That does not mean you do not watch the market because it will do all the work for you, but not include that money in the next financial plans.
Also, do not invest in reserve money set aside for unpredictable situations, because it may not be to your advantage to sell whenever an emergency occurs!

2. Do not invest the borrowed money on the stock exchange. Borrowed money is interest-bearing and must be repaid within a certain amount of time. If the stock market does not confirm your theories, you will have to take money from other sources to cover any losses and to repay the borrowed amounts.That way, you may unbalance your budget over a long period of time and it will be quite difficult to recover financially. Reimbursement of borrowed money, which you have not benefited from due to decreases, creates a lot of stress and you will remain with a negative image about the capital market.

3. Investments on the stock exchange start with small amounts. It is much more comfortable to start trading small amounts in psychological terms because potential losses can still be small. All trading principles and rules are the same regardless of the amount you invest, whether you are a start-up investor or have a low-value portfolio. It is much easier to gain experience with an account with less zeros because you are more relaxed and you can learn from your own mistakes.

4. Start with a demo account in which to create a virtual portfolio. This will help you better understand market mechanisms and build your own information and analysis system. When you start to gain knowledge and figure out how the stock market works and are happy with the returns you get from the virtual portfolio you can start trading on a real account. You can still keep your demo account to test new strategies and make changes to your portfolio, which you are not sure you want to do in the real market. You will gain confidence in yourself and the capital market will no longer seem an unacceptable field. It costs you nothing to make a demo account, but you can gain a lot of experience.

5. Do not invest in complex financial instruments at first. Another important tip is to approach the market from simple to complex. From the basic investments that you know and know how it works and how you can gain, diversify your portfolio with more and more complex financial instruments as you gain experience.

6. Do not wait for the best price. When you have decided to sell or buy, do it at the market price. The capital market is dynamic and constantly moving, and no matter what plans you have, the market will try to contradict you. If you are a long-term investor, small price differences should not be the reason why you can delay a transaction. The more you expect the titles you are targeting to reach a certain price, the more you risk losing your earnings, or even worse, you can record higher losses.

7. Set up an investment strategy and respect it. Once you have identified the type of investor you are and your attitude towards risk, you can begin to make a strategy for future investments. The most important thing about the strategy you set is to respect it and not to change it frequently. If you oscillate between two or more strategies, you risk not to get the expected results. Discipline is one of the most important qualities of an investor, be it beginner or advanced.

8. Do not invest all the amount available in a single financial instrument. The likelihood that all the financial instruments you invest in will decrease at the same time is rather small. By allocating financial resources to different destinations, you can cover the potential loss of some of your investment through the gains made by others. No matter how tempting an investment is, do not bet on a single card!
Diversification can make a difference between a winning investor and one who still expects his investment to become profitable.

9. Invest in the long run, so downtimes will have time to recover and on long-term you can make profit.

10. Invest in blue-chips. Blue-chip shares are the most liquid stocks with high capitalization and consistent financial results over the years. These shares have increased their value over time, due to the confidence shown by investors, confirming each year without disappointing their shareholders. These shares are usualy part of a number of stock indices, which once again demonstrate their quality of capital market stars.

Last but not least, when investing in the capital market, you must always be informed and not invest based on rumors. Any information needs to be verified from multiple sources and as far as possible these sources must be reliable.

Do not forget that in order to be an investor you need to spend time on this activity and become actively involved in decision-making.