Oracle (ORCL) is scheduled to report results of its second fiscal quarter after the market close on December 10, with a conference call scheduled for 5:00 pm ET. What to watch for:

1. GUIDANCE: Along with its last report, Oracle guided for Q2 earnings per share of 96c-$1.00 in constant currency on revenue growth of 1%-3%. At the time, analysts were expecting the company to report Q2 EPS of 94c on revenue of $9.59B, but those figures have since risen to $1.00 and $9.79B, respectively.

2. TIKTOK: After video-sharing app TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance rejected Microsoft's (MSFT) bid to acquire TikTok's U.S. operations, the Financial Times reported in mid-September that ByteDance will put TikTok's global business in a new U.S.-headquartered company, with Oracle taking a minority stake in all of TikTok and not just the U.S. operations. CNBC later reported that, as part of the deal, Oracle would own about 20% of the new entity, with Walmart (WMT) also involved in some capacity. The moves all followed President Donald Trump's executive order in August saying it would ban TikTok transactions if its U.S. business was not sold by ByteDance, citing national security concerns. President Trump announced on September 20, however, that ByteDance received tentative approval for the Oracle-Walmart deal with ByteDance.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Commerce Department initiated a ban in September on TikTok downloads, though Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. halted the ban on September 27. After another month and change of back-and-forths over a potential TikTok preliminary injunction hearing, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Commerce Department won't enforce its previous TikTok shutdown order, and Reuters reported later in the month that the Trump administration had provided ByteDance with a new seven-day extension of its divestiture order. The Associated Press reported earlier this week, however, that Judge Nichols had blocked President Trump's attempts to ban the app, with the federal judge saying that the Commerce Department "likely overstepped" its use of presidential emergency powers "and acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner by failing to consider obvious alternatives."

3. CLEVELAND DOWNGRADE: Earlier this week, Cleveland Research analyst Ari Terjanian downgraded Oracle to Neutral from Buy, saying he has less conviction around a return to sustainably improving fundamentals. The analyst added that he fears a recovery may likely be "more choppy than previously thought" given checks that indicate increased instances of auditing and warning optimism from partners around Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.