A Blizzard of Earnings Reports

A lot of quarterly earnings reports and other news over the past month for the companies in our Investment Portfolio; here are the highlights:

Shares of Apple, Inc. (NSDQ: AAPL) got slammed after reporting slightly better than expected earnings figures in late January, but investors panicked over weaker than anticipated sales of its new iPhone 5c model. The company engaged in an aggressive share repurchase program to support the stock price in the days that followed, giving investors time to figure out what we already knew: Apple has too many good things going for it to allow a single data point to derail its long term growth prospects. 

Two weeks ago CA Technologies (NSDQ: CA) announced better than expected earnings plus a quarterly dividend hike to $0.25/share, resulting in an annualized dividend yield of 3%.  The stock was upgraded by many Wall Street analysts as a result, pushing its price up 5% within a few days. 

Cisco Systems (NSDQ: CSCO) delivered its quarterly earnings report last week, and overall the market responded favorably to revenue and earnings that had declined, but by less than what had been expected.  Its Board also approved a 2 cent bump in its quarterly dividend to $0.19/share, raising its dividend yield to 3.4%.

Shares of Intel Corp. (NSDQ: INTC) dropped 10% after the company announced disappointing earnings four weeks ago, but have since recovered almost half that amount back.  Intel also stated that it is seeing signs of stabilization in the PC chip market, which if true would provide a sense of exactly where the floor is for that market as sales of portable devices continue to proliferate.   Intel now has a dividend yield of just under 4% while trading at less than 14 times TTM earnings.

We finally know who the new CEO will be at Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and they didn’t have to look far as they hired a long time employee, Satya Nadella, as their new leader.  The company also announced solid earnings three weeks ago, setting the foundation for what we believe will be a very solid year in 2014.  Combined with a current dividend yield of 3% and trading at only 14 times TTM earnings, it won’t take much good news to push this stock above $40 for the first time since June of 2000 (split-adjusted).

On January 27th disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology (NSDQ: STX) reported second quarter earnings that fell short of analysts’ estimates by more than 4%, resulting in a  quick 10% dive the following day.  Since then it has leveled off around $50/share, almost 20% below its peak price of $61 from four weeks ago but still above where it was trading as recently as three months ago.  At current levels the stock is trading at only 11 times TTM earnings while paying a dividend yield of 3.6%.

The other disk drive manufacturer in our portfolio, Western Digital (NSDQ: WDC), reported earnings on January 22nd that were slightly better than anticipated, but the stock dropped anyway in part due to concerns over Seagate’s poor numbers.   However, the stock is still trading close to its all-time high reached last month just before the earnings announcement and appears to have strong support at the $82 level.

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