Oracle (ORCL)

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%.

Last time around their earnings were a bit disapointing, which is when he bought it. Thinks the stock has room to grow. Thinks it will continue growing in the future.

(Market Call Minute) Has been underperforming. Prefers others.

(A Top Pick May 11/12. Up 16.82%.) They are behind on their Cloud and he doesn’t know why but it is very concerning and he has them on his Watch list. Sales are still pretty good. Hardware division has been the real problem for them. Still likes.

Has been a very acquisitive company. Made a ton of acquisitions throughout history and almost all of them have gone exceptionally well. Has grown its services and products very, very well. Cloud computing platform is growing very rapidly. Recurring revenues are very high. Trading at about 13X earnings. P/E ratio of 16.8 and a yield of 0.68%.

The only disappointing, slightly negative story is that there is still a lot of hardware dependency. Cloud side has been incredible but that area has a lot of competition with SAP AG (SAP-N). Very cash-rich. Over the last year they’ve been focusing on midsize emerging cloud switching delivery companies globally. He is a very minimal holder and wishes he had had a lot more. Over the next year, this is a company where you absolutely want to be.

(Top Pick Dec 14/11, Up 16.27%) Sold a few months ago. He was concerned with the revenue growth. Hardware side was a drag on the company. He switched to Qualcom.

(A Top Pick Sept 7/11. Up 18.85%.) Dominant business software. Really, really aggressive. Acquisitive. About a 3^rd of their sales is out of Europe and in spite of the tough times there, they continue to do very well. The developing world is expanding at a more rapid pace and this company is there for sure.