Cisco (CSCO)

(A Top Pick Sept 6/13. Up 10.48%.) Still likes this very much. Trades at a below market multiple. They still are building big, big parts of the backbone for the Internet. The Internet is going to continue to grow. There is some discussion out there as to whether this company should be broken up into a growth company and a sort of, grow slow company. Still thinks it has good growth potential in front of it. 3% plus dividend.

(Market Call Minute.) Thinks they are reinventing themselves in the router market to some degree. On the hardware side they are still one of the great long term stories. They generate cash and have good profit margins.

Topped out in 2000 at about 18X its Book Value and then has spent 10 years in the wilderness. Gradually all that equipment that was installed back then is getting technologically old and is needing to be replaced. In the meantime we have Cloud computing coming on strong, and this company is superb in the hardware area there. Yield of 2.96%.

(A Top Pick Aug 21/13. Up 8.99%.) Balance sheet is in fantastic shape. His view here is infrastructure. Whether you are on a PC on the Internet or mobile, the backend infrastructure of the Internet needs to be built out. This is a company that builds the switches and the routers.

A 54% upside to get to his model price of $38.54. It just needs a catalyst to get it moving.

They have so much cash that if you take it out they are trading sub-10 times earnings. It is quite a discount. They last beat incredibly low expectations. Analysts talked positively and recently you saw a bit of a move.

(Market Call Minute.) Likes this and is actively looking at it. Looks really, really cheap, and he is getting closer to perhaps making it a Buy.

(Market Call Minute.) This is old tech, and we are seeing some spending being done by corporations. Thinks you will do okay here.

(A Top Pick May 31/13. Up 5.53%.) Still likes this. His model price is $37, a 49% increase.

Chart shows a downtrend from last August to December, followed by a bit of base building and then it broke out to the upside this month. Good volume.

This is a value manager’s dream because Wall Street hates this company. All analysts have downgraded it. When he looks at it, he sees a company with about 30% of the market cap in net cash. Earnings will have flattened this year at around $1.95-$2 level. This company remains #1 in the world in all of their businesses. Have tremendous scale. Great management team. Earnings are poised to rebound in 2015, partly due to just general tech spending increases especially in their area. Yield of 3.25%.

Just doesn’t see major growth for a company like this. Margins are being attacked from a variety of different fronts. There is a lot of disruptive technology coming out that will affect them. Good company, but not a growth company.

(A Top Pick May 31/13. Down 4.88%.) If this goes lower, he will continue to Buy. The main issue, over the last year is that the market shunned value companies. They went for growth and momentum. This hasn’t had much market movement, but that means there is more value in it. This is still registering a 64% upside. 3.3% yield.

In this business, you can be dominant one day and then someone else comes out with a better, cheaper, more efficient widget and start taking your growth from you. Still the dominant networking company, but other people have been nipping at its heels and taking market share from them. Maybe okay for a trade, but not one he would run out and buy. He has his worries about tech stocks. That’s all everybody wants to talk about and that starts to worry him.

Should I sell? You always have to think about your holdings as to whether you are employing them in the best possible way today and into the future. Often investors think of their own history and that they want to get even, which is a destructive way of thinking about your portfolio.