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

To: Michael Young who wrote (10104)	3/14/1999 1:01:00 PM
From: Benkea	Respond to of 19080

"Oracle: Avoid on Weakness (3/12/99) by Chris Bulkey" Well, of course! Buy it when it is expensive and avoid it when it is weak. Buy HIGH, sell LOW - right. These guys get paid for this #hit no less.

To: Michael Young who wrote (10104)	3/14/1999 1:08:00 PM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

I just got back and briefly scanned through some 200+ messages on the thread. It looks like I missed a couple of DBA's throwing punches at each other, but I can't muster up the will to sort through the "I tune better than you do" nonsense. If there was any real interesting technical stuff that got posted here over the past several days, would someone do me a favor and post a message number or two. I have a feeling, however, that I didn't miss much except the sound of my paper gains being flushed. I'm still very upbeat about Oracle 8i and Oracle Developer 6.0 (which is late) and WebDB (which I installed on my laptop on Thursday. Things are starting to look like the Oracle roller coaster ride I used to enjoy in the late 80's - early 90's. Time to get ready to ride it up (and down?) again. - Michael PS - In my humble opinion, tuning the SQL statements in an application is the responsibility of the application developer not the DBA. The DBA should insist that no application go into production until the SQL has been properly tuned. PPS - I am not, and will never be a Certified Oracle anything. They have too many "correct" answers on the exams that are just plain wrong, and I can't see paying for the privilege of supplying the right answers and having them marked wrong.

To: Michael Young who wrote (10104)	3/14/1999 1:51:00 PM
From: Benkea	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

"H&Q reduced its earnings forecast for Oracle since it sees weakness in all areas of the business. Having been on the high side of consensus estimates, the brokerage has pulled its forecast slightly below the consensus-to $0.84 per share this year and a buck in fiscal 2000. This puts the shares at nearly 30 times forward earnings for a company whose business is decelerating." MSFT is expected to earn $2.68 (if you ignore quality of earnings concerns raised by their lowering of opp earnings by .08 to be made up on one-time gains - sounds kinda like a Japan IPO - doesn't it) vs. $2.29 trailing twelve for a forward P/E of 60 vs. a growth rate of 39% for a 54% premium to growth. CSCO is expected to earn $1.62 vs. $1.32 trailing twelve for a forward P/E of 61 vs a growth rate of 23% for a 165% premium to growth. DELL is expected to earn .74 vs. .53 trailing twelve for a forward P/E of 57 vs. a growth rate of 40% for 43% premium to growth. INTC is expected to earn $4.69 vs. $3.55 trailing twelve (which was a 9% DECLINE from the previous twelve mths in 1997) for a forward P/E of 25. Intel appears to be priced relatively well except $4.69 is only a 32% increase from 1997 (not 1998 levels). ORCL is expected to earn .84 (we will use H&Q's numbers since they are under consensus to be conservative) vs. .65 previous twelve for a forward P/E of 34 vs. 29% growth for a premium to growth of 17%. ORCL, INTC, MSFT and CSCO growth rates ALL declined in 1998 vs. 1997. However, ORCL sells at the smallest premium to growth of the bunch. ORCL's balance sheet, margins, and ROE are extremely competitive with the bunch. Bottom-line: ORCL is NOT expensive (might even be cheap) when compared on a relative basis to the valuations of the other tech leaders. That said, they are ALL EXPENSIVE since all of their growth rates are decelerating!