The major averages posted weekly losses. Oracle and IBM sold off especially hard. Financial journalists rushed to catalog this as "oversold" because apparently we needed a feel-good term for stocks that ate shit.
Oversold implies temporary. Oversold suggests the market made an error. Oversold whispers that if you buy now, you're contrarian. You're not contrarian. You're holding bags for a database company and whatever IBM does now. Consulting? Cloud services? Typewriter maintenance?
The technical indicators agree these stocks went down too fast. RSI readings scream capitulation. Moving averages crossed over like a geometry proof nobody asked for. The charts show classic panic selling, which means retail traders finally read their quarterly reports.
Here's what oversold actually means: more sellers than buyers at recent prices. That's it. The whole analysis. Everything else is a bedtime story we tell ourselves so we can sleep after averaging down on enterprise software companies.
Oracle sells databases. IBM sells… legacy infrastructure and the vague promise of quantum computing that'll arrive sometime after the heat death of the universe. Both got beaten down this week. Both will probably bounce. Both will probably disappoint again in three months when everyone remembers why they sold off in the first place.
The article lists these as opportunities. Buy the dip, presumably. Load up on tech stocks that got oversold because the market is irrational and you're the only rational actor. You and every other moron refreshing Reddit threads about RSI divergence at 2 AM on a work night.
The major averages posted weekly losses but Oracle and IBM posted weekly humiliations, which is different only in that humiliation doesn't recover with a Federal Reserve pivot.
Photo by Patrick Weissenberger on Unsplash

Leave a Comment