Uber, Facebook, and Booking.com are best picks to play unfolding recovery, Wall Street analyst says

• Mark Mahaney, RBC Capital Markets lead internet analyst, told CNBC that Uber, Facebook, and Booking are his top three stocks as the recovery play unfolds.
• The analyst said he's looking beyond COVID-19 "winners" like online entertainment and e-commerce sites.
• Mahaney's favorite recovery stocks are those with good business models, even if they're slow to recover.
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Mark Mahaney, RBC Capital Markets lead internet analyst, told CNBC on Tuesday that his top three stocks are Uber, Facebook, and Booking.com.

The analyst said he's looking past the "winners" from the COVID-19 crisis, like Amazon, Shopify, and Netflix and turning to recovery stocks, or "vaccine stocks" — presumably referring to stocks that will rebound once a vaccine for the coronavirus is developed. On Tuesday Vladimir Putin said that Russia has approved the world's first COVID-19 vaccine, and US companies are racing to develop vaccines.

Mahaney said the recovery stocks he likes particularly are "the one's that have really lagged year-to-date, but I think are good business models that are starting to recover, maybe more slowly than I thought two, three months ago, but are starting to recover."

He then listed "the Ubers and Lyfts, travel names like Booking.com, and ... some of the advertising names like Facebook" as examples.

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He said his top three stocks are Uber, Facebook, and Booking. Uber was down 1.96% in before-hours trading on Tuesday. On Monday evening a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled that the ride-hailing company, along with its competitor Lyft, must classify its drivers as employees with benefits instead of independent contractors. Booking is up 2.34% in pre-hours trading and Facebook is down 1.23%.

"That's the basket I find interesting as this recovery play hopefully unfolds," Mahaney said.