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

To: Brian K Crawford who wrote (14919)	11/22/2000 2:33:50 PM
From: lml	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

Good analysis and post, Brian, particular for the long term POV. The points you highlight as to why you remain long the stock are essentially my sentiments as well. I guess what I and many have to learn here is how myopic the Street really is, refusing to look out beyond a quarter or two in determining a proper market cap for a stock. I think this makes sense for cyclicals, but I would argue to the contrary for growth stocks. IMHO, it is unreasonable to expect the numbers of any growth stock to grow smoothly, and sufficiently predictable Q to Q that should one single Q prove the slightest disappointing the result it to upset the longer term prospect of future growth. Just as the path between two points is not necessarily a straight line, neither is an ascent up a mountain, or out of canyon a constant ascent. There are periods of slow ascent, even subtle descent, as well as periods of rapid ascent, but over the long term, if the effort is based in solid fundamentals (i.e. gorilla theory) that effort will result in an ascent to the top. It is indisputably apparent that the Street, and therefore investing, does not work this way. There is money to be made with jagged turn in extremely short term projections. All I can say at this point is that these valleys between the peaks can only spell buying opportunity.

To: Brian K Crawford who wrote (14919)	11/22/2000 2:47:00 PM
From: WTSherman	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 19079

Brian, agree completely with all of your points about why ORCL is a good company to own(with one exception). My concern is what is the valuation that the company can sustain in a grinding bear market like this. If your horizon is 3-5 years it doesn't matter too much whether the price is $22 or $12. You'll probably do fine. If your horizon is more like 12-18 months, I'm not so sure. Also, there's two sides to the dramatic reduction in expenses that ORCL has achieved. On first glance its very impressive. However, for years it bothered me that ORCL's net margins were so much lower than MSFT's and their expenses seemed so much higher. There were lots of people who didn't like to hear that, but, the ease with which they could take SO MUCH expense out of the company indicates that it was run in a very loose fashion. Lastly, my only disagreement with you would be about value of being a "one stop shop", particularly as this relates to DBMS. Having spent years in the industry I can testify that over the past 5 years IT departments just don't worry or even think about whether their DB vendor is also their app vendor. This is good for ORCL's DB biz, since they have such a large market share and premium reputation, but, I don't think it helps their app biz very much at all. Happy Thanksgiving!