Contrasting Booking (NASDAQ:BKNG) & Ark Restaurants (NASDAQ:ARKR)

Ark Restaurants (NASDAQ:ARKR) and Booking (NASDAQ:BKNG) are both consumer discretionary companies, but which is the superior stock? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, institutional ownership, earnings, risk, valuation, analyst recommendations and dividends.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings and recommmendations for Ark Restaurants and Booking, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Ark Restaurants	1	0	0	0	1.00
Booking	0	8	27	2	2.84

Booking has a consensus target price of $236.70, suggesting a potential upside of 22.46%. Given Booking’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Booking is more favorable than Ark Restaurants.

Profitability

This table compares Ark Restaurants and Booking’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Ark Restaurants	-2.04%	-10.61%	-2.58%
Booking	25.53%	-102.96%	26.60%

Volatility & Risk

Ark Restaurants has a beta of 0.35, meaning that its stock price is 65% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Booking has a beta of 1.07, meaning that its stock price is 7% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

32.0% of Ark Restaurants shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 92.4% of Booking shares are owned by institutional investors. 37.5% of Ark Restaurants shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 0.2% of Booking shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Ark Restaurants and Booking”s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Ark Restaurants	$165.75 million	0.12	-$11.47 million	($0.88)	-6.05
Booking	$26.92 billion	5.40	$5.40 billion	$9.04	21.38

Booking has higher revenue and earnings than Ark Restaurants. Ark Restaurants is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Booking, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Booking beats Ark Restaurants on 13 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Ark Restaurants

Ark Restaurants Corp., through its subsidiaries, owns and operates restaurants and bars in the United States. It operates restaurants in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Las Vegas, Nevada; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Florida; and Alabama, as well as fast food concepts and catering operations. The company was incorporated in 1983 and is based in New York, New York.

About Booking

Booking Holdings Inc, formerly The Priceline Group Inc., is a provider of travel and restaurant online reservation and related services. The Company, through its online travel companies (OTCs), connects consumers wishing to make travel reservations with providers of travel services across the world. It offers consumers an array of accommodation reservations (including hotels, bed and breakfasts, hostels, apartments, vacation rentals and other properties) through its Booking.com, priceline.com and agoda.com brands. Its other brands include KAYAK, Rentalcars.com and OpenTable, Inc. (OpenTable). As of December 31, 2016, Booking.com offered accommodation reservation services for over 1,115,000 properties in over 220 countries and territories on its various Websites and in over 40 languages, which included over 568,000 vacation rental properties (updated property counts were available on the Booking.com Website).