I miss the old days, the days when I when I would go home and listen to the Oracle (ORCL) conference call and think about what the impact would be for the stock market -- and the Nasdaq in particular. The numbers for Oracle were, quite frankly, pretty darned good, especially cloud and licensing revenue, which I was actually worried about. When you do 5.5% growth in constant currency and you are talking about $6.6 billion, that's pretty darned good.
The client news was terrific too, including MGM Resorts (MGM) , which is run by the very savvy Jim Murren who, if he wanted to, could have figured out a way off of Oracle. Murren bought the full suite. Similarly, I like that Marvell Semi took them, again a smart client, Hormel Foods (HRL) and Johnson Controls (JCI) . I think that these can't be sneered at. It's a lot more big names than last quarter.
But you know what? In this tape, it doesn't matter. The stock will go up for a day and then what? It's like what happened with Cisco (CSCO) . Good numbers. Goes up for a couple of days and then gets a foolish downgrade that actually crushes the stock.
None of this behavior was possible before we entered the bear market that started October 3 and 4 of this year. We simply stopped caring about the fundamentals beyond the one day that the companies report.
So if you own Oracle, what you do? We are so oversold we should be able to bounce for days. It was that good a quarter.
Nevertheless, the fundamentals ceased to matter after those two days, the day when Jay Powell declared war on the economy and Vice President Pence declared economic and political war on the Chinese.
I long for the days when homework mattered. But those days left us two months ago. Now we have this monstrously treacherous tape that gives you a respite now and then. For Oracle, this is now.
Soon it will be then.
