Were getting closer. It moved up a little since we spoke a few minutes ago, so we reindicated the range, 33 to 36. And its about 10 to 15 million shares in that range that are paring off and it narrowed to 3 from 4. So i think its shaping up and we dont as we said before, we dont know how much is actually going to be sold right now, but 10 to 15 is not a shockingly large number. Its a well, it depends on how you look at it in the context of the number of shares that are eligible to sell, its about, you know, in the 10 range. But thats fairly typical, 10 for an ipo, and this is not an ipo, its a direct listing. Whats amazing to me, it doesnt matter, direct listing, ipo, whatever you want to call it, this year ipos are tending to price toward the high end and open above this is happening here if we take 33 to 36, pick a number 34 if it might open, thats 30 over the Reference Price average ipo in my experience, maybe would open 10 higher on a good day weve seen ipos routinely opening 20 higher and here, perhaps, 30 yeah, i think were in a healthy range to potentially open we just need the rest of the interest to firm up before were going to be in a position to open up. Now, what do you right now, is this final process any different than a normal ipo process at this point . When youre really just trying to pare off . We dont have the shares that are underwritten out there, but the process of paring it off is similar. Its very similar its just, maybe, takes a little longer, like we said its coming in over a longer period of time but the process is basically the same one and the outlook is looking very similar to the rest of the ipo. So te coo point here, direct listing, still a way of going public, just like an ipo process. And were still seeing similar firstday pops this hasnt happened yet, but its moving in that direction. Its getting there quickly. Well keep an eye on all of this here and i think were getting a little bit closer and maybe well open a little bit before spotify, 12 45 maybe a little experience helps. Well keep an eye on this and be here all throughout the morning. Back to you. Bob, we can only hope thanks sticking with slack, lets bring in business insiders henry blodgett, an early investor in slack, and our own leslie picker here at post nine. Henry, it sounds like youre impressed with the recurring revenue model. This is a great business. And watching it take over our company was amazing. We had a newsroom where everyone talked to each other suddenly the newsroom got totally silent and i was noticing that my emails took a lot longer to get responses to nobody was checking. Whered everybody go . like, dude, youre an old man. Join slack everybodys on it. So it has just taken over all the metrics look great its an incredibly highmargin business ultimately. Like atlasian, like salesforce. Com and others, just an incredible business glenn, what is the market here d. A. Davidson put out a note that says that the market is 1. 5 billion users. They said messaging is viral whatsapp taught us that. Is that what slack could eventually come, from 10 million to Something Like 1. 5 billion is that realistic . Well, i think if you look at whats driving slacks growth today, if youre a large company, you really need to drive innovation in your business, become more responsive to customers and slack is really a tool that helps you do that, just as henry mentioned. You can communicate one to one across work groups, across teams, across functions or even across whole companies very simply and easily within slack and the platform itself is also very powerful, because it brings in data from lots of other Business Applications in a very rich and integrated way. So i think the market for slack is huge as a result, because Large Companies are really driving towards innovation and slack is a real big, important piece of that puzzle what do we think glenn, are we talking existential threat to email as we know it . I do think from an internal email standpoint, as stewart said earlier on your show, Stewart Butterfield, the ceo, you know, email is reducing in volume as slack is increasing in volume so that is definitely play number one for slack its the drive into internal email. Over time, if slack is truly even more successful, theyll Cross Company boundaries and start to attack, you know, external email, as well. But for now, internal email is definitely under assault with slack. But henry, the company thats under assault from that is microsoft. So whats stopping microsoft from introducing a slack killer and putting it in its stack and having all microsoft users start using it theyre late. Its Network Effect business once a Company Adopts it to pull it out and switch to Something Else is very difficult i would say its ultimately going to be complimentary to email. We still use email we use it a little bit differently. People still talk on the phone, believe it or not. All of these different communication mechanisms just sort of layer in, they find a niche. We need all of them. But it is certainly taking over a lot of what we used to do with email. Certainly the relationship they have with consumers is feeding their awareness, which is why were having this direct listing in the first place, right exactly if you didnt know that slack existed, it would be hard to be on the buy side of todays direct listing, because you dont use it you dont know anything about it thats why only certain companies, Companies Like slack and spotify, that have Ample Capital raised currently on the balance sheet, slack has 800 million in cash right now, so as Stewart Butterfield said this morning on squawk box, they didnt need to do a capital raise. The listing was more just to allow it was a liquidity event for employees and previous investors to just have an opportunity to sell their shares so leslie, what does a textbook performance for a director listing its a good question we dont have that many data points normally you would take a traditional ipo and say, if it was priced well, it would rise 15 to 20 , stable trading throughout the day, no major glitches, no major drops or pops but what is a perfect day for slack . I think thats a really good question, because youre right, we cant do the money left on the table question were not really looking at performance. I mean, were looking at it relative to the Reference Price. Were looking at it relative to where the shares were trading on the secondary markets. And so far, at 36 a share, it would be up about 35 from both the Reference Price and the average price they were trading at in may. But i would say success would be, you know, relatively low volatility, no major technical glitches we should look at this more from a technical standpoint, as opposed to a performance standpoint because, really, where they close today is going to be the first major data point in the Public Markets, because the shares werent sold at an ipo price. Glenn, as an earlier investor, im sure your returns are going to be handsome, but does it matter to you how you get your exit, whether its through a direct list organize an ipo you know, ultimately, the performance of slack and its stock price over time is going to be a result of how they do financially. And so, you know, the direct listing is certainly an interesting feature to the slack debut, as was mentioned, they have a bunch of cash on their balance sheet, so they didnt really need to raise money in this event and because people know the product, the marketing that comes along with an ipo wasnt that important to them so im really more focused on how does the Company Perform over the next ensuing quarter twob quarters, three quarters and years out. I think the opportunity is vast, as i mentioned earlier and thats what the big story is here about slack so, glenn, a company saying, we dont need the money, how close does that tell you that they are to profitability . Well, look, theyve got over 800 million of cash on the balance sheet. And you can look at their quarterly results, as henry mentioned earlier, Gross Margins in this business are very significant. And from a gotomarket standpoint, the company is quite efficient. So there really is reason to believe that slack will be a very profitable company. Just like other Cloud Software businesses that have proceeded it, you know, gen one companies. Two quarters, two years, two decades . I dont think its decades away, by any stretch i think they will be profitable on this cash if they had any doubt about that, im sure stewart would have considered raising money in this event and this is a business where its actually smart for them to use huge marketing spending, get out there, get into companies, build the base, over time, many years down the road, you can begin to dial back and suddenly youre wildly profitable this is what salesforce did, what amazon has done, many others this is a case where if youre on the board, its like, keep going for it get into these companies now its worth it. Youll get the return on the cash sorry, i was going to add to that point i think its a really good point. Remember, slacks reported net dollar retention, or think of that as sort of samestore sales growth of over 130 per quarter for the last couple of quarters. So they just need to turn the lights on and the business has been growing more than 130 . So get market share now, because it will be worth a lot in the future dont they have giants to worry about, facebook, workplace or anything like that . Sure, but theyre a point product. This is all they do. They have a huge lead, they have a huge brand lead. Its just a tough sell to create this from scratch and go in, what are the advantages. And also, the other big trend here that theyre taking full advantage of is what you would describe as consumerization of the enterprise individual employee groups suddenly adopt this. Then they spread virally within the company. Completely different model than lobbying the cto for years to install some megaclie Client Software server program. And theyre already in these organizations. Look at thenumber of free user versus paid users, thats their future pipeline. And Stewart Butterfields story is truly remarkable, which im sure well talk about more later in the hour. Henry, leslie, glenn, talk to you soon great to be here. The big earnings mover this morning, oracle leading much of the tech sector to the upside. Josh lipton joining us from San Francisco with more on whats moving that. Josh so, kayla, heading into this report, remember, some analysts had actually been a bit nervous about oracles results, highlighting potential currency challenges but Larry Ellisons company here managing to beat expectations on the top and the bottom the stock now up more than 25 on the year. Revenue increasing 1 . The company saying sales will grow more than 2 in the current period mark hurd is competing hard with big rivals like amazon and that has led to some interesting strategy shifts, for example, just recently, announcing that new Cloud Partnership with microsoft. Remember, there are two big segments for oracle. Revenue from Cloud Services and license support. Thats the companys Largest Division it was unchanged at 6. 8 billion. That includes cloud revenue, but also includes maintenance fees and Traditional Software its other onpremise license sales that dropped 12 hardware dropping 11 . Here is ellison on the call. Some of our businesses that are not hot, but the good news is the hot businesses are now bigger than the notsohot businesses and thats determining our future so boston line here, what does this report tell us about oracles quest to become a true cloud powerhouse i checked in with evercores kirk matenner this morning there is clear evidence that some of its Cloud Business is gaining traction, especially on the Application Side on the infrastructure side, though, where hurd is competing with jeff bezos and satya nadella, theres still a big question about whether the growth we saw this quarter is indeed a sustainable trend but investors you see voting this morning and moving that stock sharply higher kayla, back to you nearly 9 thank you, josh. See you a little bit later this hour a big show on squawk alley, still ahead, Sherrod Brown is with us to tell us why hes critical of facebooks new crypto offering. And still a lot more to come on slack as we await for the first trade. Citadel telling cnbc 12 45 is the upper bound for that trade well see if it happens this hour squawk alley will be right back dow and the s p have now wiped out their losses from may. The s p set an alltime high earlier this morning, up 10 and 13 and oil is up big on this news that a meeting on iran is about to take place at the white house. Art cashin is here at post nine. Its good to see you thank you our friend from rbc says if it werent for the permian, we would be above 100. I think thats probably right, but the permian has made a world of difference. Were a major, not just swing producer, but were a major producer now i think youve got something strange going on over there. Obviously, in an allout military conflict, iran couldnt supplant the United States, but i think theyre playing a different kind of game the president has said over and over again, he does not want to put u. S. Troops at war in the middle east. So i think iran thinks theyve got a little wiggle room there, they can push a little harder and push a little further to see if he will be restrained from doing anything so it will be interesting to see what kind of response it is. The good news, obviously, is that it was a drone, there was no loss of life. So that would have changed the odds greatly but the bounce in oil is modified, because of the fact that were producing so much do equities respond to this whole situation out there or not . It depends on what kind of response you see you know, for now, the geopolitical shift is mainly toward the trade talks, again. President xi deciding suddenly to visit north korea, tells me hes looking to pick up a chip there that trump wont be able to refuse, so when he walks in, it will be less about trade goods and more about, i can do this for you in north korea. So do you want to back off on some of your demands or perhaps theres going to be some movement on north korea with President Trump visiting south korea, tagged on to the g20 next week do you think investors are misplacing their expectations for volatility because the focus has been on china. And its been on trade and now we see these tensions ratcheting up in the middle east, the president tweeting, iran made a big mistake. So how do you think theyre pricing this in . Well, as i said, it depends on what the response will be so far, theyre just calling a meeting. As i said, i think most traders see it the way i do, that the president is reluctant to do anything militarily, at least massive militarily in the middle east so he will remain restrained so the concentration will remain on things like the trade talks and where we go from there but we cant afford to let it drag on too long first of all, the president cant afford it, because youve got the election coming up but if you looked at some of the great reports and other things that weve seen, the slowdown in the Global Economy is reaching this shore and if you continued to slow down at the rate weve slowed down in the last two months, by the fourth quarter, you could be border line recession. Obviously, if youre running for office, you dont want that. It leads me to the last question here. We see bad news as being good news, in light of the fed, that all makes sense. When does bad news become bad news again well, first of all, its something large scale militarily would happen that would clearly be bad news but i think youre probably getting to that, again, the Central Banks around the globe are all collectively moving preemptively talking about lowering rates theyre not going to wait for a slowdown theyre going to try to cut rates ahead of time. Now, the bank of japan staid pat, but coroda said theyd be willing to cut again theyre already at negative rates. The eu is already at negative rates when you had dry heat come out. So at some point, trying to get lower on negative rates is going to have a counterproductive effect art, well talk to you soon thank you. Art cashin is made in america still an option thats a question that many u. S. Business owners with significant overseas exposure are now offering and in washington, hundreds of companies testifying against a new round of potential tariffs joining us now to discuss that is the president of new yorkbased textile company, scott goldstein. Thank you for being here thank you for having me so first, tell us about where you stand in the trade war as it is right now are your products currently subject to tariffs right now, were not. We are on list four, which would be the list of everything going to 25 tariffs right now, we have not been trif tariffed which is what secretary mnuchin by design will have the biggest impact on consumers. Thats the unfortunate thing about this whole circumstance. Were a business that has been around for 86 years. And we used to run a sewing operation in the United States, but unfortunately, thats been gone for 20 years now. Theres no more weaving, dying, or any way to buy fabric to make a curtain in the United States thats been long gone. Our only source of product is china. If you look at the hts code for where our goods come from, readymade curtains, 95 of them come from china. So passing this tariff on will only be a tax on the consumer. So if the president says, companies who dont like these tariffs should just move back to the u. S. , thats not an option for you . Its really not an option like we said, we cant even buy the Raw Materials here anymore i dont even know where we can buy t