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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Gore who wrote (14901)	11/20/2000 8:50:41 PM
From: WTSherman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19080

<Remember, the standard procedure is to look at the Trailing Twelve Months.< Thanks, I'm pretty familiar with how these things are reported. What you're missing is that 70% of the reported income in the last 12 months came from one time gains on the sale of marketable securities. If you subtract that out and then recalculate the taxes you'll find out what they earned from operations and interest income(which is the only continuing part of income). Without the one time gains from sales of those securities(which came from company's ORCL invested in before they came public) you find that on an on-going basis ORCL's P/E based upon trailing earnings is about 80(before today's drop). If you're interested, here's the link to ORCL's financials: oracle.com BTW,there is a difference between this type of gain and the very large interest income that MSFT generates from its cash hord. That income can be presumed to continue as long as they preserve their cash. Moreover, given the drubbing that most of the dotcoms and other recent IPO's have taken I don't think you'll see ORCL showing and significant gains from the sale of securities in the near future.