International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) will report earnings on Thursday after the close. Big Blue may not be a growth story any longer, but it remains massive, and its high stock price puts it among the most important Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stocks. It has the second highest weighting, at 7.2%, of the index.

Be advised that this story has been updated.

What has been interesting here is that IBM shares have risen handily over the past couple of weeks, almost as if shareholders are expecting some new information for the IBM of tomorrow.

We will be most closely watching to see how the company refers to its dead-set $20 earnings per share (EPS) target by the end of 2015. The hope here is to get a post-2015 look for IBM, beyond just buybacks that are engineering higher EPS.

Our own synopsis after Barron’s talked the stock up is that IBM remains a value trap. Stanley Druckenmiller just talked about an instance of IBM not reinvesting for the future but just rewarding holders today.

IBM’s consensus estimates are $4.29 EPS and $24.13 billion in revenue.

UPDATE from WhisperNumber.com: IBM’s whisper number is $4.31 EPS, two cents ahead of the analysts’ estimate and showing some confidence from investors. The Whisper email update said:

IBM has a 67% positive surprise history (having topped the whisper in 39 of the 58 earnings reports for which we have data). The overall average post earnings price move is “positive” (beat the whisper number and see strength, miss and see strength) when the company reports earnings.

Estimates for next quarter are $4.44 EPS and $23.31 billion in revenue. Estimates for this year are $17.87 EPS (versus $16.28 a year ago) on a 2.4% revenue drop to $97.4 billion. That is called financial engineering, using buybacks to drop the share count to artificially boost the EPS.

While IBM has maintained a dead-on EPS target of $20.00 by the end of 2015, the Thomson Reuters consensus estimate for 2015 is $19.78 per share. Also, pay attention to IBM’s backlog of future orders. That services backlog fell to $138 billion last quarter from $143 billion in the prior quarter.

Earlier this week, IBM shares were up just over 2% so far in 2014, but the stock is now up more after a 1% gain to $194.32 ahead of earnings. The 50-day moving average is down at $185.83, and the 200-day moving average is at $183.17.

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