Oracle (ORCL)

(A Top Pick Feb 5/13. Up 8.56%.) In this one for the long haul. Likes the Cloud Computing component of it. Good strong balance sheet. Dividend is growing. Valuations are very, very reasonable. Still a Buy.

After their quarterly release, they did pretty well. Reorganized their sales force as they had pretty soft sales. In the big cap tech space, you wonder how much competition is out there and what people are missing. Over the last little bit there is more optimism. Not one of the cheapest at this point but they have great market position.

Just bought it. Very large software company that has underperformed. Reasonably valued and very cash generative. Hopefully they can transition to cloud computing. They generate organic growth but acquisition is definitely part of their growth strategy.

Owns and likes it. There is social media, analytics of data and the cloud. This is where these guys operate. They will do well with the cloud.

This company has got a multitude of fairly large diverse companies. Their Cloud offering is doing well but still a small part of their business. Feels that Sun Microsystems, an acquisition they made, is holding them back. Sales growth is quite muted.

Trades at 10X earnings and has massive free cash flow. Buying back $12 billion worth of stock every year. Raising its dividend. They will be reducing shares outstanding and earnings don’t have to grow by very much as long as they shrink the float and it could trade at a 13-15 valuation which gets you to $45-$50.

Great company, strong position in databases. Companies find it hard to move away from them. The problem is that the DB business is fairly mature. Oracle is slow to adapt to the cloud, however they are also unsure how to deal with ‘Big Data’. Others are finding that the world is changing very rapidly. A solid company but the transition is going to start to eat into their growth. This does not qualify according to his growth criteria.

Ten times free cash flow and ten times earnings. Massive share buyback. Doubled dividend recently. It is a utility. If you run a fortune 500 company you have to use their database. Thinks it will get a bigger multiple.

(A Top Pick September 10/12. Up 0.84%.) Has been struggling as all technology companies have been struggling with a slow global economy. Businesses do not have a lot of confidence in investing in technology and this company has to develop to stay competitive. Doing a good job and have a strong balance sheet. Increased their dividend. Still a Buy.

Likes the stock. This space continues to make a lot of sense. This is trading at 1X PEG ratio, 10X earnings and a 10% growth rate. Pretty attractive at this point.

About a year ago he was alarmed by the fact that the sales revenue line was decelerating. When he looked into this, he found that the earnings were keeping up but it was because they were cutting costs, which is fine, but that only goes on so long. Revenues are the fuel. He continues to see weak revenues.

Have good products but are up against enterprise spending budgets. Software is not a priority in the same way that data analytics, big data or storage are. They have a product on the enterprise side that has kind of missed the sales targets they originally planned. Made excuses rather than explanations and created doubt in investors’ minds. Missed the boat on a number of things. Senses that they are building the balance sheet in order to do something. Would wait for a better entry point.

Missed numbers a week or so ago. They missed analysts’ expectations but he thought numbers were decent. They doubled dividend in the last year and did a huge share buy-back. They will do very well as economy does well. High margin business (50%) and they have good products. About 10 times earnings. Cheap way to play the IT spend.

He is seeing so many good reasonably cheap ideas out there. Earnings have doubled over the past 2 years but the stock price has gone nowhere and the stock got hammered on their earnings report. To him that is a “fat pitch”. None of their customers are going to leave tomorrow.

Large database and software provider. Last quarter was weak. There were some sales that didn’t close and Easter fell in the previous quarter. Have their own Cloud offering called Fusion, which should do well. Yield of 0.7%.