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Oracle Shorts May Have Seen SAP Numbers Coming

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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SAP’s (SAP)  quarterly earnings and its plan to spend a load of money in an attempt to pick up smaller customers drove the stock down 7% on January 24. CIBC downgraded the European enterprise software company and its arch-rival Oracle (ORCL).

Some portion of the investors on Wall St. lost faith in Oracle earlier in the month increasing short interest in the company by over six million shares to 58.2 million.

Concerns that the two big enterprise software companies can deliver out-sized 2007 results have indeed spread to the stocks. Over the last five trading days, SAP’s shares are off almost 5% and Oracle’s are down about 1%. Both have underperformed the Nasdaq over that period.

After reasonable runs in Oracle and SAP shares from July to early January, a little doubt is sneaking in.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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