Microsoft Aiming To Be Best Dow Component

The Dow’s second best performer so far this year, just behind Apple, was also the best performer Thursday following the Federal Reserve rate cut, gaining 1.8% and easily outpacing the other Dow components. I’m referring to Microsoft of course, one of the best tech stocks to have in your portfolio this year.

Shares gained on Thursday in response to Microsoft increasing its quarterly dividend by $0.05 to $0.51 a share, while also offering up a $40 billion share repurchase program. The dividend increase is $0.02 more than Wall Street expected, and the share repurchase program is more than double this year’s share repurchases.

Also on the horizon is the first fiscal quarter earnings report for Microsoft, due on October 24. After the company blew expectations out of the water in the past quarter there’s a very good chance we’ll see shares rising ahead of this coming earnings report.

Analysts are looking for earnings of $1.24 a share when Microsoft reports. That’s in comparison with $1.10 a share reported in the same quarter last year.

Microsoft also reported $1.71 a share this past quarter, with a 64% jump in revenues from its Azure cloud computing platform super-charging results. With cloud computing an increasingly important part of Microsoft’s strategy it’s completely possible the Azure revenues and profits continue growing massively, giving earnings a huge boost for some time to come.

Also coming is Project xCloud, which is meant to deliver console-quality gaming to mobile devices. It will launch in beta in October and could help take the edge off declining xBox revenues.