From January 2015, she started to practice leetcode questions; she trains herself to stay focus, develops "muscle" memory when she practices those questions one by one.
2015年初, Julia开始参与做Leetcode, 开通自己第一个博客. 刷Leet code的题目, 她看了很多的代码, 每个人那学一点, 也开通Github, 发表自己的代码, 尝试写自己的一些体会.
She learns from her favorite sports – tennis, 10,000 serves practice builds up good memory for a great serve. Just keep going.
Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
In a matter of months, Oracle has given investors epic highs and painful lows.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has competitive advantages over rival solutions.
OCI's expansion is becoming increasingly risky as Oracle's free cash flow plummets and debt soars.
Oracle is paying a high price as it attempts to punch its ticket to the clouds.
There are few stocks that encapsulate the highs and lows of growth stock investing quite like Oracle(ORCL+2.33%).
Over the last year, Oracle has gone from a legacy software company turned Wall Street darling, to the poster child of high-risk, debt-fueled artificial intelligence (AI) spending.
Oracle is now down a staggering 54.9% from its all-time high (achieved last September). Here's why Oracle could still be a millionaire maker, and some risks to consider before buying the tech stock.
Oracle's potential is undeniable
An essential quality of a long-term investor is patience, which allows an investment thesis to play out. But too much patience can teeter on complacency when dealing with a debt-heavy company like Oracle.
Oracle's database and data management software segment is high-margin and generates tons of free cash flow (FCF), but it's not big enough to fund Oracle's cloud infrastructure ambitions.
Oracle wants to expand the big three cloud players -- Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet -- into the big four, with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) being the premier cloud for high-performance computing and AI applications.
Oracle stock hit an all-time high last September after the company outlined an aggressive road map to grow OCI revenue from $18 billion in fiscal 2026 to $144 billion in fiscal 2030.
For context, Amazon Web Services -- which is the largest cloud infrastructure player in the world -- generated $128.7 billion in 2025 revenue. Meaning Oracle is projecting its cloud revenue less than five years from now to be larger than present-day AWS.
That's the millionaire-maker investment thesis for Oracle, in a nutshell. If that forecast is even remotely close to being true, and OCI generates similar margins to AWS (35.6% in 2025) -- then Oracle stock will likely produce massive returns for investors over the next five years, and potentially compound several-fold over the ultra long term. But the forecast is riddled with uncertainties.
A race against the clock
Oracle's OCI projections are based on remaining performance obligations (RPO) -- which is basically another term for a backlog. Oracle reported $523 billion in RPO in its earnings results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, ended Nov. 30, 2025, but $300 billion of that is tied to OpenAI.
In the meantime, it is raising more money through a variety of debt and equity instruments -- further straining its balance sheet.
Oracle is only a buy for risk-tolerant investors
Oracle is spending a fortune building data centers as quickly as possible to convert its backlog into realized revenue.
Investors looking for a safer way to bet big on cloud computing and AI should consider Microsoft or Amazon. Oracle's aggressive bet could play out and take significant market share from the current leaders, but it depends on a lot going right.
Because the company has so much debt, investors can't just sit idly by and hope that the gamble pays off.
Oracle will report third-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings in the coming weeks. A larger RPO number is unlikely to impress Wall Street, so investors should instead focus on Oracle's spending road map, FCF burn rate, and timeline for improving its balance sheet.
Netflix Stock Gains. The Market Is Betting It Loses Warner to Paramount — Barrons.com
4 min read
By Andrew Bary
Netflix stock is rallying Wednesday as Wall Street bets that it will walk away from its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery now that Paramount Skydance has submitted a revised proposal that was favorably received by Warner Bros. on Tuesday.
Netflix shares are up 5.2% to $82.08, while Paramount Skydance stock has risen 1% to $10.49. Warner Bros stock is down 0.6% to $28.97 despite the higher Paramount bid because a higher Netflix proposal may not materialize.
Most Netflix investors haven't been thrilled with the company's pursuit of Warner Bros. given the high price that Netflix would pay for its studio and streaming business, the ample debt it would need to take on and the negative signaling effect of a big acquisition for a company that has historically grown organically.
Barron's wrote recently that the real winner of the Warner Bros. battle would be the loser of the bidding war because of the likelihood that the winner would overpay. We wrote the loser's stock likely would stage a relief rally.
Gary Black, the managing partner of the Future Fund, posted earlier Wednesday on X that "Netflix should walk away." He cited greater regulatory uncertainty with the Netflix offer.
He pointed out that Netflix stock traded at more than $100 before it surprised Wall Street by agreeing in early December to buy key parts of Warner Bros (its studio and streaming businesses) for $82 billion including assumed debt.
Black has written the risk/reward in Netflix stock has been favorable with considerable upside if it walks away and limited downside if it wins the Warner takeover battle.
Investment manager Mario Gabelli told CNBC Tuesday that Netflix stock would go up sharply if it backs out of the Warner Bros bidding.
Seaport Global analyst David Joyce wrote Wednesday that the new Paramount offer "might just do it."
Paramount boosted its cash offer for all of Warner Bros. Discovery to $31 a share from $30, agreed to pay the $2.8 billion breakup fee to Netflix and accelerated a 25 cents a share quarterly "ticking fee" payable to Warner Bros. shareholders if the deal doesn't close to the end of the third quarter of 2026. Its prior proposal would have started that fee at year-end 2026.
The Netflix offer that was accepted by Warner Bros. involved $27.75 a share in cash for the Warner studio and streaming business with Warner's cable network business to be spun off to Warner shareholders.
The complex Netflix offer has some problems, particularly the uncertain valuation of the Warner cable businesses that would be spun into a new company called Discovery Global.
Paramount still doesn't have the blessing of the Warner Bros. board. Warner said Tuesday that the new Paramount offer "could reasonably be expected to lead" to a superior proposal. Wall Street is betting that Warner Bros. will accept the revised Paramount deal and that Netflix will walk away rather than match the Paramount offer.
There are some problems with the current Netflix offer. The most important probably is the valuation of the Warner cable properties. That valuation is critical to value of the entire Netflix offer.
Versant Media, the cable spinoff from Comcast that owns CNBC and MSNOW (formerly MSNBC), has traded poorly since it made its debut in early January and now is valued at little more than three times projected 2026 Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).
Versant shares trade around $30, down from about $45 when the stock began trading last month.
Put a similar multiple on the Warner cable business and there could be less than $1 a share in value per Warner share for that business given what could be $16 billion of debt attributed to it, Joyce wrote Wednesday. That's below the $3 to $4 a share in value that likely would be needed to make the Netflix offer superior to the Paramount offer.
Joyce wrote that Warner and Netflix may need to reallocate debt between the studio and streaming business and the cable business to reduce leverage at the cable business to make the Netflix offer more viable. Such a move would cut the value of the Netflix offer for the studio and streaming business and potentially reduce the value of the total package paid to Warner holders.
"The NFLX match may need to, at a minimum, fix (in conjunction with the WBD Board) the amount of debt now allocated between WBD's S&S (studio and streaming) and DG (Discovery Global) segment," Joyce wrote.
"The valuation leakage risk is possibly too significant now that an improved PSKY offer exists. However, we think this could be a graceful way for NFLX to exit, which their shareholders will likely receive positively — although we do not expect sentiment to return NFLX to its prior highs from last summer," Joyce wrote.
Black posted on X that if Paramount wins, Netflix could be in a position to buy all or parts of Paramount/WBD more cheaply in a few years. Paramount would be paying over $100 billion for Warner Bros. (including assumed debt) if its deal is accepted and it would take on substantial debt to buy the company that analysts have put at seven times projected 2026 Ebitda — most investment grade companies try to keep debt to under three times their Ebitda
Paramount now has a market value of around $11 billion versus over $70 billion for Warner Bros. It's almost unprecedented for such a small market-cap company to buy a so much larger one. It's possible because billionaire Oracle chairman Larry Ellison is willing to backstop a sizable chunk of the financing for the deal and help his son, David, the Paramount CEO, get the prize he seeks.
Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
During a downtrend, the first candle is a long black candle. The second is a white candle (not long) that opens below the low of the previous candle and closes at the low of the previous candle. The On Neck pattern is typical during a downtrend. The fact that a small rally is built by the second candle but ends at the low of the previous black candlestick indicates that the bears should prevail. It is similar to piercing pattern but bearish because there is no penetration of the second candle.
on platforms like Investing.com display standard technical patterns—such as bullish engulfing, Morning Stars, and continuation patterns—to analyze price action. These patterns help identify potential trend reversals or continuations for STW stock by mapping open, high, low, and close data over various timeframes.
Key STW/Technical Analysis Patterns:
Bullish Engulfing: A small red candle followed by a larger green one, signaling a potential upward reversal.
Morning Star: A three-candle pattern (long red, small-bodied, long green) indicating a reversal from a downtrend.
Three Bar Continuation: A large candle, followed by a small opposite-colored candle, and another large candle in the original direction, indicating a trend pause and continuation.
Rising/Falling Three Methods: Continuation patterns involving a long candle, three small counter-trend candles, and a final long candle.
These tools allow traders to monitor market sentiment and identify key support/resistance levels for STW.
Meta struck a massive chip deal with Nvidia that includes new standalone CPUs and next-generation GPUs and Vera Rubin rack-scale systems.
The social media giant will also use Nvidia for networking technology and to support AI features on WhatsApp.
Meta and Nvidia have a long-standing partnership, but Meta also uses its own in-house silicon, relies on chips from AMD and was reportedly considering using Google’s TPUs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement that the expanded partnership continues his company’s push “to deliver personal superintelligence to everyone in the world,” a vision he announced in July.
Financial terms of the deal were not provided.
Shares of Meta and Nvidia climbed during extended trading on Tuesday. Advanced Micro Devices stock sank about 4% on the news.
In January, Meta announced plans to spend up to $135 billion on AI in 2026. “The deal is certainly in the tens of billions of dollars,” said chip analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies. “We do expect a good portion of Meta’s capex to go toward this Nvidia build-out.”
The partnership is nothing new, as Meta has been using Nvidia graphics processing units for at least a decade, but the deal marks a significantly broader technology partnership between the two Silicon Valley-based giants.
Standalone CPUs are the biggest new thing in the deal, with Meta becoming the first to deploy Nvidia’s Grace central processing units as standalone chips in its data centers, as opposed to incorporated alongside GPUs in a server. Nvidia said it’s the first large-scale deployment of Grace CPUs on their own.
“They’re really designed to run those inference workloads, run those agentic workloads, as a companion to a Grace Blackwell/Vera Rubin rack,” Bajarin said. “Meta doing this at scale is affirmation of the soup-to-nuts strategy that Nvidia’s putting across both sets of infrastructure: CPU and GPU.”
The next-generation Vera CPUs are planned to be deployed by Meta in 2027.
The multiyear deal is part of Meta’s overall commitment to spend $600 billion in the U.S. by 2028 on data centers and the infrastructure the facilities require.
Meta has plans for 30 data centers, 26 of which will be based in the U.S. Its two largest AI data centers are under construction now: the Prometheus 1-gigawatt site in New Albany, Ohio, and the 5-gigawatt Hyperion site in Richland Parish, Louisiana.
Also included in the deal is Nvidia’s networking technology, Spectrum-X Ethernet switches, which are used to link GPUs together within large-scale AI data centers. Meta will also use Nvidia’s security capabilities as part of AI features on WhatsApp.
The social media giant doesn’t solely rely on the top chipmaker. In November, Nvidia stock fell 4% on reports that Meta was considering using Google’s tensor processing units in its data centers in 2027.
Meta also develops in-house silicon processors and utilizes chips from AMD, which won a notable deal with OpenAI in October as AI giants seek a second source to Nvidia amid constrained supply.
Nvidia’s current Blackwell GPUs have been on back-order for months, and the next-generation Rubin GPUs recently went into production. With the deal, Meta has secured a healthy supply of both.
Engineering teams from Nvidia and Meta will work together “in deep codesign to optimize and accelerate state-of-the-art AI models” for the social media giant.
Meta has been developing a new frontier model dubbed Avocado as a successor to its Llama AI technology. The most recent version released last spring failed to excite developers, CNBC previously reported.
Meta’s stock has been on a roller coaster in recent months, and its AI strategy in particular has puzzled Wall Street.
The stock saw its worst day in three years in October after the company announced ambitious AI spending, then popped 10% in January after reporting stronger-than-expected sales guidance.
CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian and Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
