November 29, 2025
Every successful investor knows a painful truth: knowing when to sell is often more critical than knowing what to buy.
While financial media overwhelmingly focuses on buying opportunities, our research consistently identifies companies facing significant headwinds that merit serious consideration for selling. These aren’t just stocks underperforming the market; they’re businesses confronting structural challenges, deteriorating fundamentals, or carrying valuations disconnected from financial reality.
What you won’t find here: reactionary calls based on short-term price movements or headline volatility. Each company on this list has been thoroughly analyzed across multiple metrics that historically precede substantial declines.
Smart investors understand that portfolio management requires both addition and subtraction. Sometimes the best investment decision is to redeploy capital away from troubling positions before problems fully materialize in the share price.
This week’s watchlist highlights stocks showing critical weaknesses that demand immediate attention:
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 that will still reduce the outstanding share count from approximately 1.16 billion shares to just 116 million shares. Trading at $0.81 per share at the time of writing, the stock will resume trading Tuesday morning at approximately $8.10 per share assuming no further selling pressure, though the market’s harsh reaction to the announcement suggests investors anticipate continued downward momentum even after the artificial price inflation takes effect.
While reverse stock splits don’t fundamentally change anything about a company’s underlying business—merely adjusting the price required to own the same proportional stake—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, with the company’s 52-week range of $0.35 to $2.32 illustrating a persistent downward trajectory that no amount of split mathematics can reverse. 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 requiring reverse split intervention.
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, with the stock’s decline forcing this cosmetic restructuring that does nothing to address underlying competitive disadvantages, regulatory constraints, or market saturation challenges. Investors who thought they understood their ownership stake will wake up Tuesday owning 10% fewer shares at a 10x higher nominal price, with nothing changed about Tilray’s competitive position, growth prospects, or path to sustainable profitability. 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, making Tilray a textbook example of why reverse splits often signal the beginning rather than the end of shareholder value destruction.
Oracle Corporation (ORCL)
Oracle confronts 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 that when Oracle reported earnings on September 9th and made it appear that several customers drove the increase in backlog, investors discovered the following day that OpenAI represented almost the entire increase, making the contract appear to be the result of a competitive bake-off that Oracle had won. However, OpenAI’s subsequent announcement of more than $1 trillion in AI data center contracts across multiple providers exposes the Oracle deal as far less exclusive or strategically significant than initially portrayed, suggesting 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 and the growth projections embedded in its current valuation. Oracle stock traded as high as $345.72 within the past year before collapsing to around $202 per share currently, representing a 40% decline that still leaves the shares trading at 46 times earnings despite a forecast growth rate of just 23% annually including the OpenAI revenue. This produces a PEG ratio of 2.0, which sits at the extreme end of what value investors might consider a fair price under the best circumstances, yet Luria’s analysis suggests circumstances may be far from best if OpenAI’s orders don’t materialize as Oracle implied when announcing the contract.
Trading at around $202 per share with a market capitalization 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 and converts backlog into sustained revenue growth at the rates management has projected. The 66.10% gross margin demonstrates strong underlying profitability when the company delivers services, but the analyst’s concerns about whether OpenAI represents genuine committed demand versus competitive positioning creates uncertainty about Oracle’s ability to achieve the growth rates necessary to justify current multiples. If the OpenAI orders prove illusory or materialize at substantially reduced levels compared to the announced $300 billion figure, Oracle’s expensive valuation becomes indefensible, particularly given the stock already declined 40% from recent highs yet still trades at premium multiples that assume flawless execution of an AI infrastructure buildout that may be significantly smaller than investors believed when Oracle first announced the contract.
Deere & Company (DE)
Deere & Company illustrates 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 fourth-quarter earnings of $3.93 per share versus analyst forecasts of $3.83, while revenue of $12.9 billion destroyed the $9.8 billion consensus estimate by 32%, demonstrating strong execution during a 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, with the strong fourth quarter providing relative outperformance against a challenging year but insufficient to offset investor concerns about the outlook.
Management’s fiscal 2026 guidance revealed the depth of challenges facing the agricultural equipment sector, with CEO John May projecting “large ag” sales declining as much as 20% while other business segments show only low-to-mid single-digit growth, producing combined expectations for full-year earnings of approximately $4.75 billion. Divided among the company’s 270 million shares outstanding, this guidance implies earnings below $17.60 per share, falling dramatically short of the $19.32 per share analysts had projected for fiscal 2026 and representing a further decline from the 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,” with improvements expected thereafter, 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 capitalization 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 from already-reduced fiscal 2025 levels. 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 despite management’s assertions. The combination of premium valuation multiples during a cyclical trough, guidance calling for further earnings deterioration in the year ahead, and uncertainty about when the agricultural cycle will inflect positive creates a risk-reward profile unfavorable for investors, particularly those who purchased shares expecting the strong fourth-quarter performance to signal improving trends rather than representing a temporary bright spot in an otherwise deteriorating trajectory.
