ORCL

Investors saw the bloodbath in the U.S. stocks this Monday. The market’s volatile nature coupled with a long-term uptrend has led to losing nearly $1.7 trillion of capitalization on March 10. The S&P broad measure closed the day 2.7% lower, down 155 points, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 futures posted their worst single-day performance since September 2022, falling more than 4% to 19,118 during Asian hours the next morning. Of course, this was not an irreversible emergency call for dip buyers, yet further bullish demand has very quickly transformed itself into a pent-up force waiting until the proper time. The optimistic camp is still here but most brave guys preferred to retreat to the bushes, purely standing by with prudence, after they fled helter-skelter and scrambled away from a suddenly panicked sell-off.

Markets were reportedly spooked by fears over a potential recession, which sparked sharp declines on Wall Street following U.S. President Donald Trump's uncharacteristically evasive comments as he declined to rule out chances for the American economy to enter a recession this year. “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big,” Trump literally said in an interview with Fox News that aired on the weekend, adding that the goal of his policy is “bringing wealth back to America", which is "a big thing", but taking "a little time". He later compounded the verbal damage on Air Force One by saying, “Who knows?”. According to CNN, "It was less what Trump said but how a president known for unshakeable certainty said it", but even those ill-wishers to Trump who immediately raised their voices that Trump "never told voters there might be a recession on the road to his new golden age", acknowledged in their editorial that "the latest recession panic may be fleeting". Monthly jobs report showed last Friday that the U.S. economy added an adequate number of 151,000 jobs in February, with the unemployment rate only slightly edging up to 4.1%.

What Trump has done with 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada, even though partially frozen for a month, as well as doubling the rate of levies on Chinese goods to 20% and more threats to European imports, is fraught with retaliatory troubles for American manufacturers. Markets are rightly sceptical that Trump's team is able to quickly translate the tariff policy as a launching pad for negotiations with partner countries into solutions that will stabilize the stock market jumps. On the other hand, nothing has basically changed for the economy in the last few days, and so what happened is still more like a naturally emotional response, providing a useful release of excess steam, especially in overheated tech assets. In another interview with CNBC on Monday, Kevin Hassett, who is the head of Trump’s National Economic Council, tried to play down worries about the health of the economy: “What I think that what’s going to happen is the first quarter is going to squeak into the positive category, and then the second quarter is going to take off as everybody sees the reality of the tax cuts”, meaning an ambitious timetable for pushing a tax-cutting bill through Congress. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday also said “there’s going to be no recession in America”.

Last week, stock and crypto traders already faced a roller coaster, and just landed to lower levels right now. With the investing community additionally losing some confidence in the whole situation, the search for the ultimate bottom will continue, but we estimate that attractive levels could be located somewhere around 5,500 points in terms of the S&P 500. Moreover, not all popular tech stocks were ready to fall as rapidly as Tesla, which lost 15% of its value in one go. More quarterly earnings from key companies may sweeten the pill. Shares of Oracle initially revealed a 2% jump upward on the same day when everything else was falling, and the AI database business only later reluctantly retreated by 4% following all peers' decline. Oracle was promised to make a sizable $500 billion investment into a cloud data centres infrastructure project Stargate, in conjunction with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Japan’s SoftBank. Oracle CEO Safra Catz shared a vision that growing sales backlog will help drive as much as 15% of revenue growth in its fiscal 2026, aiming for $66 billion, to beat 12.6% of consensus analysts’ estimates. "We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year," Oracle's chair Larry Ellison added.

Oracle's cloud revenue in the last quarter rose 25% to $6.2 billion, with the total revenue being mostly in-line with forecasts after coming out at $14.13 billion, instead of average estimates of $14.39 billion. Oracle projected the current quarter's total revenue growth of 9-11% in constant currency, with cloud revenue rising 24 to 28%. Its CEOs reiterated plans of expansion in partnerships with NVIDIA and AMD. Oracle business collected $1.47 of adjusted profit per share, compared with analyst projections of $1.49 per share, to keep the same high level of $1.47 from the previous quarter. While Oracle shares are still trading below the key psychological $150 level, its price could slide lower by inertia of a broader sell-off in techs. However, targets around $200 for Oracle are worth keeping in mind.