Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) Receives Analyst Upgrade; Growing AI Opportunities Point to Significant Upside Potential
We recently compiled a list of the 15 AI News Investors Should Not Miss. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) stands against the other AI news investors should not miss.
According to Ark Invest, an investment manager focused on disruptive technologies, artificial intelligence breakthroughs are expected to increase the share of the global equity market associated with disruptive innovation from 16% to 60% by 2030. With inflation transitioning to deflation in several sectors, the firm believes that five innovation platforms, namely robotics, energy storage, AI, blockchain, and multi-OMIC (biological analysis) sequencing will be profoundly impacting macroeconomic metrics over the next few years.
“Interest rates are likely to surprise on the low side of expectations, broadening the equity rally from a narrow subset of stocks and reinforcing the need for diversified AI investments.” -Catherine Wood, CEO and CIO
Read more about these developments by accessing 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock and Beyond the Tech Giants: 35 Non-Tech AI Opportunities.
One of the firm's ETFs with the investment theme of next-generation internet outperformed broad-based global equity indices in the third quarter, benefiting from its holdings in companies involved in innovative technologies. The year-to-date performance of the fund is 16.81%, outperforming its category by 1.59 percentage points year-to-date.
In light of this trend, joining CNBC’s “The Exchange”, technology reporter Kate Rooney revealed how Wall Street is trying to cash in on the AI craze using AI itself. According to Rooney, the new world of generative AI is starting an “arms race for hedge funds”. Modern versions of AI today are better than human traders in ways more than one. They learn from mistakes and get smarter along the way, and they ultimately require minimal human intervention. Combining this with the rise of OpenAI and Anthropic, these “off-the-shelf” models tend to be cheaper.
Moreover, while human traders may be capable, they often succumb to emotions and tend to make mistakes. This is why Intelligent Alpha CEO Doug Clinton believes that a “lack of emotion” is actually the edge or “superpower” of AI. That said, the program revealed how hedge funds are now looking into AI to “get ahead of the markets”, where their use of AI will ultimately help them improve decision-making in the field. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised significant capital along the way, ultimately need enterprise clients to scale, and Wall Street is an ideal fit due to its reliance on data and analysis.
Intelligent Alpha has launched a first-of-its-kind ETF named after famed stock trader Jesse Livermore. The ETF uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini to construct a global equity portfolio. As per Clinton, firms that get on board with AI could gain an edge with a price tag of millions of dollars.
“What it does is it adds some intelligence to indexes, which are just definitionally sort of a set of rules that can’t be smart. And they also take that emotion out of the active side where human beings are still making decisions, but we get caught up. You know, we make mistakes and sometimes those compound. And so I think by fixing those two issues, AI has the potential to really capture a lot of value in terms of assets flowing to these new AI-powered funds.” - Intelligent Alpha CEO
Read more about these developments by accessing 10 Unsexy AI Stocks According to Goldman Sachs and 10 Buzzing AI Stocks According to Goldman Sachs.
Methodology
For this article, we selected AI stocks by combing through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
Katherine Welles / Shutterstock.com
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 61
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation offering a vast portfolio of technology innovations. The company has integrated AI-powered capabilities across many of its products, introduced a $1 billion fund earlier this year to invest in AI startups, and even maintains a strong foothold in cybersecurity, offering AI-powered security tools, and much more.
On Wednesday, October 16, Citigroup analysts upgraded the stock to “Buy” from “Neutral” and raised the price target to $62 from $52 per share. This reflects an estimated 15% upside from Tuesday’s close. According to Citi analysts, investors shouldn’t overlook the artificial intelligence potential of Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO). The upgrade in the networking company’s shares by analyst Atif Malik highlights a narrowing valuation gap relative to peers, as well as a rapidly expanding AI Ethernet total addressable market that is projected to reach $10 billion by 2025.
“While AI is currently a small piece of the biz (~2% of revs), we see the potential for a stronger contribution,” he wrote. “With more AI coming, we are incrementally more constructive on the group and expect continued investor rotation out of semis/hardware into networking equipment to benefit group valuation.”
Furthermore, the addition of the company’s products in Meta Platforms’ AI hardware comes as a “positive validation of CSCO’s technology.” With at least three major hyperscalers already using its tools in their backend networks, Malik believes that the company’s $9 billion 2027 hyperscaler AI opportunity forecast may be “potentially understated”. The analyst has also increased his earnings per share estimates for 2025 and 2026 by 2% and 5%, respectively.
“We believe shares warrant a sizable discount to networking peer valuation to reflect lingering share loss concerns, somewhat tempered by growing AI opportunities. Even at a 30+% discounted target multiple to peer average, we see meaningful upside to shares”.
Overall CSCO ranks 8th on our list of AI news investors shouldn't miss. While we acknowledge the potential of CSCO as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CSCO but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.