Options Traders Flip Bearish as Oracle (ORCL) Falters

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 5, 9:53AM EST

Quick Read

Oracle (ORCL) dropped 11% in one week to $245.01, down 29% from its 52-week high of $345.12.
Oracle trades at a 60 P/E ratio while quarterly earnings growth turned negative at 1.9% year over year.
Retail sentiment on Reddit shifted sharply bearish, with sentiment scores falling from 61 to 41 out of 100.

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Options Traders Flip Bearish as Oracle (ORCL) Falters — © Scott Olson / Getty Images

Shares of Oracle (NYSE: ORCL | ORCL Price Prediction) fell 11% this past week, sliding to $245.01 as retail investors and options traders have grown wary after a months long run in AI stocks. Options traders across social platforms like Reddit, and X are leading the sentiment shift lower.

More than a few threads have shifted from cautiously optimistic to outright bearish. What’s striking is that this pessimism grows despite Oracle posting strong fundamentals and ambitious forecast for 2028 revenue.

The Options Community Sours on Oracle

Sentiment across Reddit’s r/options subreddit shows Oracle discussion deteriorating sharply. The past few days, sentiment scores oscillated between neutral and negative territory, with the most recent readings settling at 41 out of 100, a marked decline from 61 just days earlier. This isn’t casual chatter either. Recent threads collected over 100 upvotes and sustained comment activity in the first 48 hours.

The bearish tilt in options discussions reflects real concerns that go beyond typical market gyrations:

Oracle trades at a close to a 60 P/E ratio, leaving very little breathing room for any other than spectacular growth
Quarterly earnings growth turned negative at -1.9% YoY, a jarring reversal among concerns about margin pressure
The company faces intensifying competition in AI infrastructure from all comers. Everyone from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) to OpenAI is building out their own massive infrastructure.

Today, nearly all Oracle discussion is concentrated in options-focused trades rather than direct ownership. Usually this means traders are looking at Oracle as a short term speculative trade, not a long term investment. Conviction is wavering.

Technical Pressure Meets Analyst Optimism

The stock now trades below its 50-day moving average of $278.52 and the RSI has plummeted to 35.20, approaching oversold territory. Over the past week alone, Oracle has given back nearly 29% of its value off its 52-week high of $345.12.

For context, the last time RSI was this depressed was April 2025, before a sharp rebound.

The gap between what analysts see and what retail traders are pricing in suggests the market is either overreacting to near-term noise or catching something the Street has missed. Either way, if Oracle bounces from oversold levels, call option activity could surge. If it breaks lower, puts become the trade. For now, retail investors are clearly hedging their bets.

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.