Technology

After Two Upgrades, Now Is Oracle a Buy?

Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) has seen two upgrades in two days. The one thing we would point out is that Oracle shares have risen handily, up until lately. The more important analyst upgrade of the two came from Bernstein on Monday, when the firm raised the rating to Outperform from Market Perform. This is based on Oracle’s cloud gains and its ambition to grow its hardware business against its database business pressure.

The big move was that Bernstein was finally positive, to the point that it raised its price target to $49 from $40. Oracle shares are around $41.04 after a 0.5% gain in mid-Monday trading. What should really stand out here is not just a $9 hike to its price target. The big deal is that, after being cautious for quite some time, Bernstein’s price target is just $1 shy of the street-high target of $50.

On Friday, Oracle was raised to Buy from Hold at Societe Generale, but shares fell $0.16 to $40.81 on the day.

Oracle’s stock chart shows that there is a lot of resistance in the $41.00 to $42.00 level. Its 50-day moving average has worked more or less as support each time it was lightly violated in the past six months. That 50-day moving average was $39.38 as of Monday.

What about forward valuations? Oracle trades at only 14 times expected 2014 earnings, but that is for the May year-end. The stock trades at only about 12.8 times expected 2015 earnings.

The $41.04 price on Monday compares to a $41.59 consensus analyst price target and a 52-week range of $29.86 to $42.00.

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