Oracle falls 19% in five sessions as Dell holders back a Texas move
Oracle closed lower in all five sessions and lost 19.40% for the week to June 26. Texas Instruments fell 11.59%, Dell shareholders voted to reincorporate in Texas, and Bob Simpson and Faeth's new CFO bought stock.
Dell shareholders approved moving the company's legal home from Delaware to Texas on June 25, Texas Instruments fell 11.59% starting with a chip selloff on June 23, and Faeth Therapeutics' new finance chief bought about $807,190 of stock. Oracle's slide was the biggest move.
Oracle closed lower in every session last week, and by Friday it had given up 19.40%. The Austin company ended June 18 at $184.29, then closed at $175.07, $165.16, $157.53, $152.46 and $148.53 on Yahoo Finance. The percentage is a Lone Star Index calculation from those closes.
Reuters had laid out the worries on June 11, when ORCL was down 12% in morning trading. It closed down 8.53% that day, from $201.26 to $184.10, by our math. Its report cited roughly $70 billion in expected net capital spending this fiscal year, a plan to raise $40 billion in debt and equity, and a free cash flow deficit of $23.7 billion for fiscal 2026. Oracle's annual report, filed June 22, lists 2300 Oracle Way in Austin.
Chips went down with it
Texas Instruments set a record close of $332.28 on June 22. No earlier month in its Yahoo Finance history traded that high. It closed at $304.36 the next day, down 8.40%. TradingKey tied that drop to a chip selloff that started overnight with memory makers in South Korea. TI doesn't make memory chips; its annual report lists two segments, Analog and Embedded Processing. It fell again on June 26, 8.46% from $311.81 to $285.43.
| Company | June 18 close | June 26 close | Week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle (ORCL) | $184.29 | $148.53 | down 19.40% |
| Texas Instruments (TXN) | $322.86 | $285.43 | down 11.59% |
| Tesla (TSLA) | $400.49 | $379.71 | down 5.19% |
| Dell Technologies (DELL) | $409.50 | $399.49 | down 2.44% |
All four returns are our calculations from Yahoo Finance closes.
Dell's vote
Dell shareholders approved moving the company's legal home from Delaware to Texas at the June 25 annual meeting, and Fox Business reported 97% support, citing Michael Dell's post on X. Shareholder suits would go to Texas courts instead of Delaware's Court of Chancery. Dell's board had approved the plan in May, when Michael Dell said in the company's announcement, "Texas is where Dell has innovated, expanded, and invested for more than four decades."
The company's quarterly report already lists Round Rock, so nothing physical moves. It's still the kind of change we log on the Relo Feed, and Exxon's shareholders approved a similar switch from New Jersey on May 27, its vote report shows.
Who bought
Faeth Therapeutics' new finance chief went shopping a week after the company moved its address to Austin. Brian Stephenson bought 33,054 shares of FTH from June 22 through June 26 at weighted averages from $20.23 to $27.77, about $807,190 by our math, according to two Form 4s filed June 24 and June 26. He holds them through a revocable trust, and it's his whole reported position. Faeth moved its principal office to Austin on June 15, its current report shows.
Eric Oliver's SoftVest, an Abilene firm that files as a 10% owner, added 63,338 units of Cross Timbers Royalty Trust (CRT) from June 22 through June 25, about $549,809, and held 924,960 afterward, per filings on June 24 and June 26. The trust is organized in Texas, and its trustee's Dallas office is the address on its quarterly report.
The biggest check came from Bob Simpson, chairman of TXO Partners' general partner. He bought 100,000 TXO units on June 22 and 23 at about $12.55 and $12.64, roughly $1.26 million, and ended with 9,100,000 units held directly, his Form 4 shows. TXO lists Fort Worth.
Two Houston chief executives bought too. Occidental Petroleum's Richard Jackson paid $52.38 a share for 4,770 OXY shares on June 23, about $249,853, his Form 4 shows. Epsilon Energy's Jason Stabell bought 50,000 EPSN shares on June 22 and 24 through Sisu Investments, a family company, for about $265,177 by our math from his filing. Faeth's chief executive, Anand Parikh, added 2,806 shares at $19.76 on June 22, his Form 4 shows. Neither Jackson nor Stabell checked the trading plan box.
We left out a Citizens director whose filing reported monthly payroll plan purchases and a Greenland Energy director with a Denver address. The rest is on Insider Radar.
Our read
Dell's own case for Texas is mostly about where it already lives. In its May 4 filing the company said its headquarters, its CEO and the largest concentration of its U.S. workforce are all in Texas. It also called Texas an emerging leader in data center development and power generation, which it said matters to its strategy as a big AI infrastructure supplier. The proxy statement put Texas at about 43% of Dell's U.S. employees.
The 97% looks like a landslide and tells you less than it seems. The proxy says Michael Dell alone holds more than half the voting power, and he and Silver Lake together hold more than 70%, so the May filing could say plainly that those two had the ability to ensure approval. In our view outside holders never decided this one, and their part is in the fine print. Bloomberg Law reported that Dell would pick up a 3% ownership requirement for shareholders who want to sue management on the company's behalf, and that it plans to opt into the Texas law letting companies set a bar of 3% or $1 million in stock, whichever is less, before a holder can file a proposal. The board's own wording is that the benefits outweigh "certain impacts on stockholder rights," which is more candor than these documents usually offer.
Faeth's buying is a different kind of signal. Stephenson's appointment as finance chief took effect June 13, the company's current report shows, so he first bought nine days into the job. That filing doesn't say why the company left Rockville, Md., for Austin, and it doesn't disclose his salary, so we can't size the purchase against his pay. We'd still weight a new CFO buying this early more heavily than a longtime director adding to a stake.
What to watch
- July 6: The Texas Stock Exchange opens production with test symbols only, and no live securities trade, per its June 17 rollout schedule.
- July 10: The first live symbols start trading on TXSE.
- July 20: TXSE begins its broad rollout to about 3,000 symbols, with blue chips starting July 23.
- July 31: The exchange expects every listed symbol to be live.
The Texas Exchanges page tracks the TXSE rollout.
Lone Star Index publishes research, not investment advice.