Cisco - Keep It or Sweep It
January 03, 2011
– Comments (9) |
RELATED TICKERS: CSCO
Like many Fools, I hold Cisco to provide growth without a lot of risk. That hasn't been working out so well, but is the future looking brighter?
I took a look at Cisco's valuation, growth prospects and ran a quick comparison to some other large cap tech companies and decided to keep Cisco rather than sweep it from the portfolio. The deciding factor was the plan to start paying a dividend in 2011. That's well known, but still has potential to move the stock as funds that are required to hold dividend paying stocks will be able to join the ranks of CSCO shareholders.
When I started the article, I was leaning towards a 'sweep it' call. I changed to 'keep it' mainly because none of the peers I'd consider to replace it stood out as significantly better opportunities.
Sidebar: The Dow 30 tech stocks were a pretty sorry place to be for 2010. HPQ and CSCO brought up the rear of of the index. IBM was the best of the DJIA techs, but only matched the market with about a 14% gain. INTC was ahead for the year, but underperformed the market.
What's your call? Am I making a mistake holding on to CSCO? Will the DJIA tech team play catch up in 2011? Can we make The Fool pay its full pledge to Foolanthropy?
Fool on!
Russ