James Cramer said it would be silly for investors who have big gains to not ring the register after such a big move in the stock. Warren Buffet said yesterday in London that things aren't that bad right now, and that the stock market is "way out of sync with the economy.".
The market is booming. The stock market is to make money on price changes during some time period. Investing is a fast-growing activity. Investing can be structured to suit any lifestyle and age.
Daytraders are too inexperienced for bear markets and only know how to trade bull markets. Investors say the most trustworthy investment advice comes from family (49%) and friends (32%). Daytrading is no joke.
Hyper-active trading used to be like shooting fish in a barrel, but as long as people dream about becoming millionaires the institution of day trading will continue. My broker says hyper-active trading is too risky. The daytrading philosophy is really no more risky than any type of investing or financial speculation. Jim Cramer said short-term trading at the AFM was very active in the beginning - whatever that means. I like to day trade because I do not have a full time job.
Oracle (ORCL) will report its fiscal third quarter earnings after market
close today, Wednesday, and by most counts the company has bucked any economic
downturn and should turn in strong results.
Analysts are expecting earnings of 30 cents a share for the February
quarter on sales of $5.4 billion, according to Thomson Financial.
Thursday I decided to increase my long positions substantially, adding
a number of new holdings to the portfolio. With regards to particular
sectors, I decided to inch into the steel sector, as well as get
moderately long of a few natural gas producers. Additionally, I
increased the size of my positions in junior gold producers. The other
stocks I added were pretty much all specific to the company, with no
real sector theme. Finally, I decided to divest my holding in (BEAS),
because I thought there were better opportunities for my money. Here
are my trades:
News is coming in that Oracle (ORCL) is buying BEA Systems (BEAS), a leader in middleware software, for $8.5 billion! This news comes on the heels of news that Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is buying MySQL, a leading database company for $1 billion! These are two great pieces of a great consolidation story in the enterprise software industry.
BEA will add its strong middleware portfolio to Oracle. But what is really interesting here is the fact that, Oracle for years has been working towards making Oracle Fusion, its own middleware platform, as the key for its success. Oracle has now invested close to $30 billion on its acquisitions to date and this is really shaking the industry to its core.
Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) announced its 4Q09 and FY09 results yesterday (see conference call transcript). While revenues declined ~5% and net income declined ~7% on a YOY basis last quarter, the lesser-than-expected declines in topline provided a pleasant surprise.
Markets fall, Fed fixes. Fed funds futures Thursday implied a 76% chance of a 75 BP cut at the March 18 FOMC meeting, which would bring short-term interest rates to 2.25%. On Wednesday, odds were as little as 44%. Update: After today's weak jobs number, futures now see 32% odds of a 1% cut to 2%, vs. no odds on Thursday.
Subprime: Learn to live with it. The $300B U.S. subprime mess is only half over, but the remaining $150B of writedowns will hurt less than the first half. "The next leg of those losses will not come from major banks and I think the impact on the investor will not be as severe because it will be spread out, it won’t be so concentrated," CIBC economist Benjamin Tal says.
Oracle (ORCL) shares are higher Thursday morning following a bullish note from Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar. She “reinstated” her Buy rating on the stock with a $24 price target.
This is not an upgrade, exactly. Although it is not obvious from the
report, I believe Goldman previously had suspended its rating on the
stock; the firm was BEA’s adviser in its recent sale to Oracle.
Nonetheless, it is a pretty bullish review of the company’s prospects.
In a recent
blog post I questioned whether services oriented architecture [SOA] was
driving substantive transformation inside of enterprise IT. My conclusion is that something is not quite right in SOA-ville.
The
uptake of general-purpose service enablement is by no means a hockey
stick trend line. The adoption patterns some five years into the SOA
evolutionary path do not show a "slam dunk" demand effect. The role,
impact and importance of SOA is, in fact, ambiguous... still. Many see
it as merely an offshoot of EAI, rather than a full-blown paradigm shift.
We recently gathered the amount of buy and sell ratings that analysts have on each stock in the Russell 1,000 to see which ones analysts are currently the most bullish or bearish on. We treat consensus analyst recommendations as a contrarian indicator. When a stock has a high percentage of buy ratings, it makes it harder for analysts to get more bullish on the stock, hence the next direction in ratings is down. Conversely, when a stock has a low percentage of buy ratings, things can't get much worse, and the upside is much larger.
There are many stocks that are down significantly this year that still have a high percentage of buy ratings. The poor stock performance means analysts will most likely begin to get more negative in their recommendations.
Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) reported its Q4 and FY 2008 results on June 25. In a typically strong quarter, Q4 revenue was up 24% to $7.2 billion and net income was up 27% to $2.0 billion. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.47; analysts had estimated $0.44 on revenue of $6.88 billion.
Breaking down revenues by segment, service revenues were up 18% to $1.3 billion and software revenues were up 26% to $6.0 billion. New software license revenues were up 27% to $3.14 billion, with database and middleware new license revenues up 23% and applications new license revenues up 36% (compared to just 7% last quarter, which had sent the stock price down amidst concerns over low tech spending).
Oracle (ORCL) said Tuesday that it closed its acquisition of BEA Systems (BEAS) following European Commission approval.
In a statement, Oracle president Charles Phillips BEA will help the
company’s vision of a “a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA)
infrastructure” and provide “a series of complementary and
well-engineered middleware products.”
Monday morning’s news that Oracle (ORCL) had agreed to buy Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has implications for a host of companies in the IT technology sector; the deal also raises a variety of so-far unanswered questions. Here are some of the things you ought to be thinking about in the wake of the proposed deal.
Combined with Cisco’s (CSCO) recent move into the sector, the market for servers continues to get increasingly competitive. All of a sudden, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), [[IBM]] and Dell (DELL) find themselves facing Cisco and Oracle. This can’t possibly be good news for HPQ, IBM or DELL.
There is speculation that this could lead to a new wave of vertical consolidation moves - in particular by, natch, HPQ, IBM and DELL. Among the potential targets, according to Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore, are NetApp (NTAP), EMC (EMC), Juniper (JNPR) and Brocade (BRCD).
While regulators will likely take a close look at the deal, the combination not does carry the same concentration of power that an IBM deal with Sun would have involved. Stifel Nicolaus regulatory analyst Blair Levin writes Monday that the deal is likely to be approved, since “it does not reaise the issues regarding consolidation in the server and and storage markets that would have been problematic for a deal with IBM.”
This sure feels like a big deal - you can bet there will be a big banner headline in Tuesday’s San Jose Mercury News - but it is only the third-biggest for Oracle. The company paid $8.5 billion for BEA Systems (BEAS), and $10.3 billion for Peoplesoft. This is the company’s first big deal since the $3.3 billion purchase of Hyperion in 2007. (The Sun deal is worth $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of cash and debt.)
Cowen’s Peter Goldmacher contends the deal was a “defensive maneuver” to keep Sun away from IBM.
Goldmacher and other analysts note that the deal raises margin issues for Oracle; he says the company will certainly cut head count at Sun - I suspect this day will go down as a bittersweet one for many current Sun employees - but not enough in the short-run to counteract the effect of adding Sun’s lower margin business to Oracle’s mix. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Holt writes that Oracle’s shares “may tread water until investors get more comfortable with ORCL’s revenue and margin profile going forward.”
Goldmacher contends the deal will “likely accelerate the already fraying ecosystem of partnerships in the IT ecosystem and where the impact of this deal will have material and lingering effects long after the Street comes to grips with the margin story.” He thinks the biggest negative implications are gor HP, a long-term Oracle partner.
Standard & Poor’s anaylst Zaineb Bokhari Monday morning cut his rating on Oracle to Hold from Buy. “We are concerned about ORCL’s entry into hardware and the impact it could have on operating margins.”
On the other hand, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Tim Klasell writes that the slide in ORCL shares today presents a buying opportunity.
On a conference call Monday morning, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said the most important Sun products to Oracle are the Sun Solaris operating system and Java. That raises some questions about what Oracle plans to do with some non-strategic parts of Sun, including its tape storage business. With no Q&A on the call, there are no answers to questions like: What role will Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz take, if any? How many jobs will be cut? What parts might get sold off?
While JAVA shares are higher, as you would expect, ORCL is trading lower.
Now that Oracle's (ORCL) latest bid for BEA Systems (BEAS) has been endorsed by BEA management, the target on Open Text Corp.'s (OTEX) back just got a whole lot bigger, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky says.
The analyst said consolidation in the software industry will continue following Oracle's $19.38 per share (up from an Oct. bid of $17) acquisition of BEA with Open Text the most likely takeover candidate.
BeasWikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hospital, is also famous for the Radhasoami Charitable Beas Beas is 55 km from Amritsar to the west, and to the southeast 20 km from Kapurthala,
Larry Dignan (
Hickey and Walters (
