Cisco Systems Remains Top-Performing Dow Stock

Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) continues to be the best-performing Dow Jones industrial average stock year to date, with a 1.4% share price gain last week. For the year to date, Cisco’s stock is up 19.9%.

The second-best performer among the Dow 30 so far this year is Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), which is up about 18.4%. That is followed by Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA), up 16.1%, Visa Inc. (NYSE: V), up 15.6%, and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), up 14.2%. Of the 30 stocks comprising the Dow index, only 13 have posted year-to-date gains as of Friday’s close.

The Dow added 568.66 points over the course of the last week to close at 24,24,831.17, up 2.3% for the week. For the year to date, the tech sector has added 11%, the best among the 10 market sectors.

Cisco closed its fiscal third quarter at the end of April and is scheduled to report results after markets close next Thursday. Analysts are looking for earnings per share (EPS) of $0.65 and revenues of $12.44 billion. That would be a 12% year-over-year boost to EPS and more than 4% to revenues.

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After a mostly quiet week, Cisco announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had “temporarily paused” its advertising on YouTube “due to instances where third-party partners did not meet our guidelines.” The company later took down the post and replaced it with a more generic statement from Chief Marketing Officer Karen Walker: “We are working closely with all of our media partners to ensure that Cisco’s online advertising meets our stringent standards.”

The two posts are the result of a CNN investigation that found the ads from Cisco and other major brands ran on YouTube channels promoting white nationalism, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories and North Korean propaganda.

Cisco’s shares closed down about 0.8% Friday, at $45.93 in a 52-week range of $30.36 to $46.37. The consensus 12-month price target on the stock is $49.71, up nine cents from the previous week, and the forward price-earnings ratio is 16.06.

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