December 3, 2025
When it comes to investing, knowing when to sell is just as important as knowing what to buy. While most financial coverage focuses on buying opportunities, our research team has identified several companies facing significant challenges that investors should consider selling.
These stocks aren’t simply underperforming the market temporarily – they’re facing fundamental business problems, weakening financials, or carrying valuations that don’t match their current reality.
Our analysis isn’t based on short-term price movements or headline reactions. Each company has been thoroughly evaluated using multiple indicators that historically precede major stock declines.
Here are three stocks showing critical warning signs that demand your immediate attention:
Deere & Company (DE)
Deere & Company shows how guidance disappointments can overshadow operational outperformance, with shares falling 4% despite crushing fourth-quarter expectations on both revenue and earnings as investors focused instead on fiscal 2026 projections that imply a 9% earnings miss relative to Wall Street’s expectations.
The agricultural machinery manufacturer reported strong fourth-quarter results:
- Earnings of $3.93 per share versus analyst forecasts of $3.83
- Revenue of $12.9 billion destroyed the $9.8 billion consensus estimate by 32%
- Strong execution during period when agricultural equipment demand faced significant headwinds
Despite these impressive beats, full-year fiscal 2025 results showed earnings declining 28% to $18.50 per share on sales down 12% to $45.7 billion.
Management’s fiscal 2026 guidance revealed the depth of challenges facing the agricultural equipment sector:
- CEO John May projecting “large ag” sales declining as much as 20%
- Other business segments show only low-to-mid single-digit growth
- Full-year earnings expected at approximately $4.75 billion
- Implies earnings below $17.60 per share, falling dramatically short of $19.32 per share analysts had projected
- Represents further decline from already-depressed fiscal 2025 results
May acknowledged that “this past year brought its share of challenges and uncertainty” while attempting to provide hope that “we believe 2026 will mark the bottom of the large ag cycle,” yet this optimistic longer-term view provides little comfort to investors confronting another year of substantial earnings deterioration.
Trading at around $465 per share with a market cap of approximately $126 billion and offering a 1.40% dividend yield, Deere carries a valuation of 27 times earnings that appears increasingly difficult to justify given the company projects fiscal 2026 earnings will decline further.
The 42.17% gross margin demonstrates the company maintains strong pricing power and manufacturing efficiency, but these operational strengths cannot overcome the cyclical downturn in agricultural equipment demand that appears far from bottoming.
Oracle Corporation (ORCL)
Oracle faces a credibility crisis following DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria’s devastating assessment that the company served as “a pawn in the grand game of fake it ’till you make it” regarding its supposedly transformative $300 billion five-year contract with OpenAI, with the analyst slashing his price target 33% to $200 per share while maintaining a neutral rating.
Luria’s analysis reveals critical concerns:
- When Oracle reported earnings on September 9th, made it appear several customers drove increase in backlog
- Investors discovered following day that OpenAI represented almost entire increase
- Contract appeared to be result of competitive bake-off that Oracle had won
- OpenAI’s subsequent announcement of more than $1 trillion in AI data center contracts across multiple providers exposes Oracle deal as far less exclusive
This suggests OpenAI may have used the Oracle announcement to create competitive pressure on other infrastructure providers rather than making a genuine long-term commitment.
The analyst’s characterization of OpenAI as “not a serious counterpart” raises fundamental questions about whether the revenue from this contract will materialize as forecasted, with implications extending far beyond the specific deal to Oracle’s broader AI infrastructure narrative.
Oracle stock traded as high as $345.72 within the past year before collapsing to around $202 per share currently:
- Represents 40% decline
- Still leaves shares trading at 46 times earnings despite forecast growth rate of just 23% annually
- Produces PEG ratio of 2.0, at extreme end of what value investors might consider fair price
Trading at around $202 per share with a market cap of approximately $576 billion and offering a modest 0.94% dividend yield, Oracle carries a valuation that assumes the company successfully executes its AI infrastructure strategy.
The 66.10% gross margin demonstrates strong underlying profitability, but the analyst’s concerns about whether OpenAI represents genuine committed demand creates uncertainty about Oracle’s ability to achieve the growth rates necessary to justify current multiples.
Tilray Brands (TLRY)
Tilray Brands demonstrates the ultimate admission of business model failure, with shares plummeting over 21% following confirmation that the Canadian marijuana and American alcohol company will proceed with a 1-for-10 reverse stock split effective after market close Monday, December 1st.
The company, which shareholders authorized in June to execute a reverse split in ratios ranging from 1-for-10 to 1-for-20, opted for the less drastic option:
- Will reduce outstanding share count from approximately 1.16 billion shares to just 116 million shares
- Trading at $0.81 per share currently
- Stock will resume trading Tuesday morning at approximately $8.10 per share
While reverse stock splits don’t fundamentally change anything about a company’s underlying business, they serve as glaring signals that management has failed to build shareholder value through operational excellence and instead must resort to financial engineering to avoid delisting.
The stated purpose of raising the share price to reduce delisting risk highlights Tilray’s inability to maintain a sustainable stock price through business performance:
- Company’s 52-week range of $0.35 to $2.32 illustrates persistent downward trajectory
- No amount of split mathematics can reverse this trend
The 20.17% gross margin suggests the company generates some profit on product sales, but this operational metric proves insufficient to translate into shareholder returns as evidenced by the stock’s collapse to penny stock territory.
The reverse split fundamentally represents management’s acknowledgment that the cannabis-plus-alcohol strategy has failed to create a viable business model capable of generating returns that attract sustained investor interest.
The market’s 21% selloff in anticipation of the reverse split reflects investor recognition that companies healthy enough to support their stock prices through business results don’t need to resort to share consolidation gimmicks.