Oracle, a leader in technology, is now trading ex-dividend as of today.
At the end of the month, Oracle holders who bought in prior to Monday will receive the dividend payment of $0.24 per share. Others will have to wait.
That July 31 payout is over 25% bigger than the last dividend payment with a current dividend yield of 1.61%.
Oracle’s current earnings per share is marked at $3.01 with projected earnings growth next year around 10%, or almost double the industry average.
How Ex-Dividend Often Plays Out
In many cases when ex-dividend is declared, the stock tends to lose the amount of the dividend, since new buyers are not getting that extra cash.
True to form in some ways, ORCL stands at $59.53, which is a drop of $0.28 since yesterday. Over the longer term, though, Oracle stands dramatically above 52-week averages. Last July, ORCL price stood just under $50 per share, then hit a low of $42 right around Christmas. Since then, the stock rebounded over 30% to spike on July 10 over $60.
With that in mind, the moral of the story on Oracle could be that although there may be some price fluctuation due to changes in dividend status, the bullish projections on earnings growth could potentially push this stock even higher in the years to come.
Oracle’s Legacy
Service offers also draw customers to Oracle, which can pique investor interest.
Oracle’s cloud suite has gotten quite a bit of attention in the cloud-era market, which has helped to drive growth. And services like Oracle Sharding have consolidated some of the firm’s reputation as a top data-management name.
Since the days of the vanilla relational database, ORCL has made headlines in enterprise vendor work — and it doesn’t seem likely to slow down now.
Look for price holding as a new set of investors becomes eligible for the dividend after the imminent one at the end of July.
