Why Stephens Upgraded Oracle (ORCL) Farooq Fri, November 13, 2026 at 4:31 PM EST 4 min read ORCL -2.05% ^GSPC -0.40% ^DJI +0.10% ^IXIC -0.91% CL=F +0.28% Trade Oracle on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
We just published a list of the 10 Stocks With Insane Upside According to Reddit and Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) ranked 10th on this list.
US stocks edged lower Thursday, snapping a rebound that had lifted the S&P 500 1.3% a day earlier. The S&P 500 fell 0.35% to 7,592.40, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.36% to 52,297.09, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 0.39% to 25,366.09, Yahoo Finance reported, as bond yields rose. Traders weighed hot inflation data, the Federal Reserve's next move and higher oil prices.
The week's moves have been shaped by interest rates. Tuesday's hotter-than-expected inflation report convinced traders that the Federal Reserve will raise rates next month, Reuters said. According to CME FedWatch, investors fully price in a hike of at least 25 basis points, with a 13.2% chance of a 50-basis-point move. Several Fed officials have said they are open to a more aggressive path, and Wall Street analysts have raised their forecasts for more and bigger hikes, Yahoo Finance said.
Wednesday's rebound showed how quickly sentiment can swing. The S&P 500 gained 1.3% and the Nasdaq Composite 1.6% after results from an AI cloud company eased worries about the durability of the artificial intelligence trade, Reutersreported, with advancing stocks outnumbering decliners by 1.3 to 1 on the NYSE. The Treasury market was closed for Veterans Day, so bond traders could react only on Thursday.
Thursday brought another pressure point. Oil prices climbed after the president said he was no longer interested in a deal with Iran, the Associated Press reported, which complicates the inflation outlook. Higher energy costs feed into the same inflation numbers the Fed is fighting. Even so, the S&P 500 finished with a modest loss and is up 2.9% for the week.
Retail investors are watching the same swings closely, and Reddit threads tend to cluster around names where the gap between price and analyst expectations looks widest. That gap deserves some care. An average price target is a twelve-month estimate pulled from sell-side analysts, it is often revised after earnings, and a handful of outliers can skew the mean. Because upside is measured against the current share price, a sharp drop widens it overnight, while a rally shrinks it just as fast. Readers who follow that chatter can browse our list of undervalued stocks to buy according to Reddit. You may also want to read our ranking of oversold AI stocks where Wall Street analysts are spotting 50%-plus upside.
With inflation, the Fed and AI spending all in play, the stocks below sit where the debate is loudest, and each one carries an average analyst target well above its recent price.
Oracle made it to our list because it has an average upside potential of 92% and a market cap of $384.35 billion. Stephens analyst Brett Huff upgraded Oracle to Overweight from Equal Weight on November 2 and raised his price target to $213 from $185. He said the company's investor day answered the biggest question hanging over the stock, which is how it will pay for its cloud buildout. With funding for cloud infrastructure capped at $20 billion, he argued, the perceived risk of Oracle Cloud came out of the shares, and free cash flow estimates "went up dramatically."
That is what investors like. Oracle, which sells database software and cloud infrastructure and hosts AI workloads for OpenAI, put a date on positive free cash flow, the second half of fiscal 2028, and said it expects at least $30 billion in fiscal 2029. It completed a $20 billion at-the-market equity program in the first quarter and will cap further raises at $20 billion through fiscal 2030, split between equity and debt. Fiscal first-quarter revenue grew 30% to $19.3 billion.
The open question is concentration, since much of the revenue behind those estimates depends on OpenAI paying its bills. For the competitive side, see our look at whether Oracle's moat is widening or narrowing.
While we acknowledge the risk and potential of ORCL as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.
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