New York, Feb 9, 2026, 12:53 EST — Regular session
- Cisco Systems climbed roughly 2% by midday, trading just shy of its 52-week high.
- JPMorgan bumped its price target up to $95 just before the company’s quarterly report on Wednesday.
- Options traders are preparing for an outsized move after earnings this time.
Cisco Systems, Inc. picked up 2.2% to close at $86.66 on Monday, after hitting $86.93 earlier—just shy of its 52-week high.
Cisco heads into the spotlight again just days ahead of its fiscal second-quarter earnings drop, which will land after the bell on Wednesday, Feb. 11, covering the stretch through Jan. 24. The company has lined up its conference call for 4:30 p.m. ET.
Traders are betting on a swing, with TipRanks pointing to options pricing that signals a roughly 5.97% move in either direction when the report drops. According to that same TipRanks snapshot, Wall Street’s consensus stands at $1.02 earnings per share, revenue coming in at $14.88 billion. The focus: momentum in the company’s AI infrastructure and that swelling backlog. UBS’s David Vogt called AI orders “tough to forecast.” Evercore’s Amit Daryanani, for his part, pointed to an “increasingly optimized software layer built around agentic AI.” TipRanks
Fresh bullishness from JPMorgan helped move the needle, too. Analyst Samik Chatterjee bumped his Cisco price target up to $95 from $90, sticking with an Overweight call. Chatterjee said the company could top estimates if it manages to speed up revenue growth, despite the stock sitting at what he called a “near-term peak valuation multiple.” He highlighted the Nvidia tie-up as a key boost for enterprise AI uptake. TipRanks
Cisco climbed as tech names firmed up. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF added around 0.6%, with the Invesco QQQ Trust picking up about 0.9%. Nvidia jumped too, up nearly 3.5%.
Now, investors want to see whether demand is starting to expand past the handful of large AI buildouts—and whether orders in the core enterprise networking business are holding up. The focus is turning to backlog conversion and shifts in customer spending plans, which could matter just as much as the headline figures.
This setup works in both directions. When a stock is sitting close to its highs, it doesn’t take a blowup to knock it lower — just a hint of caution, a slowdown in order growth, or more muted talk on AI-related demand can do the trick when everyone’s already leaning in.
Cisco is up against plenty of competition in the switches, routers, and data-center networking hardware space—Arista Networks and Juniper Networks are both targeting those same budgets. On the security front, the company’s dealing with pure-play specialists and big platform vendors that move faster.
Right now, it’s the options market giving the signal. With implied moves sitting near 6%, traders are bracing for turbulence—this doesn’t look like a simple beat-and-raise setup.
Wednesday brings Cisco’s report after the bell. Investors are zeroing in on the outlook, tracking order trends, and looking for concrete figures from the company on AI infrastructure demand and backlog.
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