Oracle’s cloud business will keep growing as the AI boom continues.
TSMC will profit from the market’s insatiable appetite for more powerful AI chips.
Palo Alto Networks is expanding its cloud and AI-oriented cybersecurity services.
10 stocks we like better than Oracle ›
It might seem like an awkward time for novice investors to buy new stocks. The S&P 500 is hovering near its all-time high and looks expensive at 31 times earnings, and plenty of macro headwinds — including sticky inflation, elevated Treasury yields, and the Trump Administration’s unpredictable policy shifts — could compress those frothy valuations.
But if you can look beyond those near-term challenges, it’s still a good idea to accumulate some reasonably valued stocks that have easy-to-understand business models, stable growth rates, and wide moats. I believe these three beginner-friendly stocks fit that description — Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), TSMC (NYSE: TSM), and Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW) — and they could still churn small bets into big fortunes over the next few decades.
Image source: Getty Images.
Oracle was once considered an aging tech company that had run out of room to grow. It was the world’s largest database software provider, but it faced stiff competition from nimbler cloud-based competitors. However, over the past decade, the company transformed its on-premise software into cloud-based services, expanded its own cloud infrastructure platform, and acquired more companies to expand into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and healthcare IT markets.
That transformation initially compressed Oracle’s margins, but it’s now growing rapidly again as more companies ramp up their spending on its cloud infrastructure services to support their latest AI (artificial intelligence) applications. It predicts its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) revenue will surge 77% to $18 billion in fiscal 2026 (which ends in May 2026) and account for 27% of its projected revenue for the year — then soar to $32 billion in fiscal 2027, $73 billion in fiscal…
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