Key Takeaways
- Oracle stock has lost 53% over the past year, and Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated its Overweight rating and $284 target on Oct. 22, 120% up from yesterday’s close.
- The slide comes from how Oracle is paying for its AI buildout: negative free cash flow, more debt, a $20 billion stock sale and a backlog that leans on OpenAI.
- Analysts’ earnings estimates have edged up over the past 90 days, to $8.14 a share for the year ending May 2027 and $11.00 for the year after.
- Cantor’s target implies 33x forward earnings, well above Oracle’s 21x five-year average, so the call seems…a little stretched. I’m not buying it.
Oracle (ORCL) has lost 53% over the past year, and Cantor Fitzgerald thinks it can get it all back and then some.
On Oct. 22, Cantor analyst Thomas Blakey reiterated his Overweight rating and $284 price target, 120% above Oracle’s $129.10 close on Oct. 21.
Investors balked at the bill
The slide picked up in June, when Oracle said it planned to raise $40 billion of debt and equity in fiscal 2027, after negative free cash flow of $23.7 billion in fiscal 2026.
In its first-quarter report on Sept. 10, capital spending hit $28.5 billion, free cash flow was negative $5 billion, and Oracle finished selling $20 billion of new stock. On when free cash flow turns positive, CFO Hilary Maxson said on the call: “We haven’t given a particular time frame on that yet, and we don’t expect to give that today.”
Then Oracle sank 9% on hot inflation data last week, and Steve Eisman argued that half of Oracle’s backlog is OpenAI.
Cantor hasn’t budged
Cantor has held its $284 target since raising it from $229 in early June. It sees Oracle as a key beneficiary of AI spending.
Most analysts agree: 28 Buys and 7 Outperforms against 7 Holds and one Sell, up from 19 Buys in August 2025.
TIKR tracks 43 analysts on Oracle. How many say “Buy”?
See the full breakdown of Buy, Hold, and Sell ratings on Oracle, along with Wall Street’s revenue and earnings estimates, all in one place. More than 500,000 investors use TIKR to research stocks like this one. See Oracle’s Analyst Ratings
Does $284 add up?
Analysts have cut targets even as they’ve turned more bullish. The consensus target has come down from $350 a year ago to $237, its lowest point of the year…
Individual targets now run from $110 to $400.
Earnings estimates are holding up. Analysts expect normalized EPS of $8.14 for the year ending May 2027, in line with Oracle’s $8.10 guidance, and $11.00 the year after…
Both have edged up over the past 90 days, from $8.05 and $10.89, while the stock fell. And September’s raised guidance gives no reason to expect cuts.
So it comes down to the multiple. Oracle trades at 15x forward earnings, against a five-year average of 21x…
Cantor’s $284 works out to 33x expected earnings over the next twelve months, well above that average.
Maybe plausible, if investors pay up again
Debt is a big problem: Oracle had $117.7 billion of long-term borrowings at the end of August, and its bonds face downgrade risk.
Personally, I’m not buying even at these prices. I’m not convinced they’ll pull off the neocloud transformation, and that’s where the valuation re-rating would have to come from.
Of cousre, the next test is the second-quarter report in December, with cloud growth guided to 65% to 71%. If Oracle hits that and puts a date on positive free cash flow, $284 starts to look a little more reasonable.
So what is Oracle stock actually worth?
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR’s valuation model and see what Oracle could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It’s free to use.
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