Cisco Systems (CSCO)

[Gbathat]

I am hopeful that the stock will keep going up. After hours Friday it went up to 40.94.

It seems possible that they are already buying back shares. I reviewed their last quarterly earnings slides and found a note indicating they had $10 billion still authorized for future buybacks by at end of Q1, which I believe was 30 sep. That might explain why no announcement of a larger buyback yet, or it may just be taking a while for them to determine the correct tax withholding for repatriated funds.

I would guess they did not buy back much in Q2 due to tax reform uncertainty. Hopefully what we observed Friday and in some of the previous runs up was a combo of buybacks, market interest increasing due to analysts increasing price targets to $44-46, and associated strong hands from longs.

My strategy for this week is to sell enough to cover my total investment after taxes on Tuesday morning if futures are up, which would be about 15% of my call options at the current price. After that, we’ll see... probably an incremental price step sale approach to increase chances of taking some profits. I have a day job, so I’ll need to automate this each night.