When stocks perform poorly amid the S&P 500 (SPY) in a bull market, up by 13.9% in 2026, consider avoiding them.
Oracle (ORCL) lost over 20% for shareholders as of last week. The stock climbed from a $120 low when it reportedly planned a new round of layoffs. The firm already cut a meaningful 21,000 employees in the last year. Its headcount fell from 162,000 last year to 141,000.
Oracle is effectively spending heavily on capital expenditures, raising debt to fund the purchases. It is cutting jobs to offset those expenses. Should competition for neocloud from SpaceX (SPCX), Nebius (NBIS), or CoreWeave (CRWV) worsen, Oracle would have trouble renting its AI servers.
Cerebras (CBRS) attracted bearish bets with a short float of 16.12%. The firm posted a strong second quarter. Management said it saw “unbound demand for fast inference.” That led to $25 billion of RPO (bookings). But a bottleneck in data centers is a near-term risk dragging on its execution. Still, the firm secured over 600 megawatts of data center capacity that is either live now or will be delivered by the end of 2027.
Investors may want to consider trimming Meta Platforms (META). Shares indicated a double bottom at $520.26, climbing to nearly $600 recently. Lawsuits that accused Meta of creating an addictive platform could add a trillion in settlement costs. Fortunately, Meta’s lawyers will defend the firm from claims of that size.
