Oracle Corp. is one of the world's largest independent enterprise software companies, with annualized revenue over $67 billion. Its software products include database, middleware, application, and cloud-based software designed for general business purposes and for specific industries. In addition, Oracle provides product upgrades, maintenance releases, and patches through license update agreements, as well as extensive product support. Oracle also provides server hardware. It expanded its presence in the healthcare market with the Cerner acquisition in 2022. The company has about 160,000 employees. About 37% of revenue comes from outside the Americas region.

Thursday looked like a day of indecision until the early afternoon, when President Trump (again) called off strikes on Iran and said the U.S. will soon sign a deal with that country. Markets went ballistic, with crude oil tanking, Treasury bonds ripping, and stocks exploding - and with money flowing back into prior leaders, namely anything AI. After about 40 headlines that suggested a deal was close, the markets responded like the war in the Middle East is already over and that the Strait of Hormuz is already reopened.

Oracle provides enterprise applications and infrastructure offerings through a variety of flexible IT deployment models, including on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid. Founded in 1977, Oracle pioneered the first commercial SQL-based relational database management system, which is commonly used by the world’s largest companies for high-volume online transaction processing workloads. Besides databases, Oracle also sells enterprise resource planning platforms and cloud infrastructure that play an increasingly important role in large language model training and inferencing.

This pick list highlights constituents of the Morningstar US Large Cap Index that we believe offer investors the best risk-adjusted return prospects. Stocks of large-cap companies where neither growth nor value characteristics predominate. Stocks in the top 70% of the capitalization of the U.S. equity market are defined as large cap.