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Author Cisco (CSCO)
HenryTo
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 10:13 am    Post subject: Cisco (CSCO) Reply with quote

A preview of Cisco's earnings. This will probably determine the trading action for the rest of the week, given that the tech sector has been the major sector holding up the market since August:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/cisco-expected-report-solid-first/story.aspx?guid=%7B1ED183D5%2DD315%2D4F47%2D865A%2D4BB6015C5B77%7D&siteid=yhoof
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PostPosted: Thu May 10, 2012 5:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's 3Q earnings and 4Q guidance.

Quote:
Cisco Systems CSCO once again turned in results that were slightly ahead of management's guidance, with third-quarter revenue coming in at $11.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $0.48 per share. However, management's fourth-quarter revenue and earnings guidance are below what our current model reflects, and we plan to lower our near-term forecasts. We're also trimming our five-year growth assumption for Cisco's collaboration business to reflect our growing concerns over this segment's long-run competitive position. These adjustments will result in about a 10% reduction to our $26 fair value estimate. While Cisco's fourth-quarter outlook represents a moderate setback from a recent series of improving results, we think the firm's overall health is fine, and we maintain our view that Cisco's shares are attractively valued.

Management's fourth-quarter guidance of 2% to 5% year-over-year revenue growth implies no sequential growth at the midpoint, and we now expect full-year revenue will increase 6.3%, to $46 billion. Although this result is in line with management's three-year revenue growth target of 5% to 7% per year through fiscal 2014, we had expected improved execution, a largely refreshed product portfolio, and fairly easy first-half comparisons to drive growth faster. Management cited the challenging spending environment as the primary culprit for next quarter's deceleration, highlighting the fact that issues in southern Europe have expanded, while enterprise orders fell 1% from the year-ago quarter. Although weak demand in Europe is not surprising, the decline in enterprise orders is troubling from a broader IT spending perspective.

Cisco's switches and router segments collectively accounted for $5.8 billion, or 50% of total sales this quarter, and posted combined year-over-year growth of just under 3%. Sales of switches grew 5%, to $3.6 billion, which we believe was largely driven by an ongoing refresh to 10 Gbps port speeds in the data center market segment. The maturation of Cisco's Nexus 7000 platform, combined with what we believe to be poor execution from the firm's primary switch competitors, have temporarily squelched competitive threats within the data center segment, and we expect Cisco's share to remain stable through 2012 within this segment. While investors seems to be increasingly concerned that software-defined networking presents an immediate risk to Cisco's data center switch business, we do not believe that SDN poses a meaningful intermediate-term threat. SDN is still in its infancy, and Cisco's market dominance should allow it to shape the SDN adoption curve while management fully develops its strategy around this emerging set of technologies.

We do, however, think that the campus, access and aggregation switch segments will come under greater pressure over the next few years, as we expect growing competition from integrated vendors, server virtualization, and a push toward network layer consolidation to accelerate price declines and limit volume growth in these segments. We maintain our view that the overall switch market has matured, and our current forecast of low-single digit revenue growth through 2016 reflects this belief. Although switch growth will likely remain sluggish, we believe Cisco's competitive position in the switch industry is stronger now than it was 18 months ago.

Like its peers, Cisco experienced weak demand from service providers in the third quarter, and the firm's router segment revenue was flat at $2.1 billion, or 19% of sales. North American carrier capital spending is widely expected to improve throughout 2012, and management noted that service provider orders grew 5% year-over-year this quarter. Cisco should benefit over the next few quarters from an ongoing transition to its CRS-3 core router platform, while Cisco's ASR 5000 mobile packet core router system appears to be gaining increasing adoption. Given service providers' ongoing transition to 4G wireless networks, the success of Cisco's mobile packet core platform bodes well for the firm's long-run competitive position in the service provider market segment. Although Cisco's router segment has recently underperformed our long-term forecast of mid single-digit revenue growth, we are not lowering our five-year forecast just yet, as we believe that the demand environment has been unusually weak over the past three quarters.

The remainder of Cisco's product segments generated solid results overall in the third quarter, growing 9% percent to $3.3 billion, as strong year-over-year growth in data center, wireless and service provider video masked weak results from collaboration. We believe that Cisco's collaboration business is at a competitive disadvantage to Microsoft MSFT, and will face long-run pressure from other low-cost alternatives to video conferencing. We plan to significantly lower our growth forecasts for this segment to reflect this view. Security posted relatively solid results, with 9% year-over-year growth. However, we have grown increasingly concerned that focused vendors such as Checkpoint CHKP and Palo Alto will gain share of customers' network security spend at Cisco's expense, and F5 FFIV is just beginning to aggressively push into the market. While Cisco's recently announced CX security module is designed to be competitive with other vendors' application-aware firewalls, the product is relatively new, and Cisco's historical track record in layer 4-7 is mixed, at best. Network security is a strategically important market for Cisco, and we believe the firm may need to make another acquisition in this area in the near future to maintain its long-term leadership.

Services posted another solid quarter, growing 13%, to $2.5 billion, while generating 65.5% gross margins, 360 basis points above the corporate average. As we've noted before, Cisco's services revenue is recurring in nature, generates high gross margins, and leads to stickier customer relationships. We note that service revenue has generated double-digit year-over-year growth in 22 of the past 27 quarters, with remarkably consistent gross margins over the same time period. Management continues to focus on growing service revenue faster than product revenue, and we model upper single-digit annualized service revenue growth through 2016.

Cash generation was predictably healthy. The firm produced $2.7 billion in free cash flow, and its cash balance, net of debt, increased to $32 billion, or $5.87 per diluted share. Cisco is expected to close on its acquisition of NDS in the second half of calendar 2012, which will consume $5 billion in cash, or just under $1 per share. The company bought back $550 million in stock at an average price of $20.28 per share, and paid out $432 million in dividends. Cisco's shares continue to trade below our fair value estimate, and we would like to see management accelerate share buybacks while its stock is undervalued.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 09, 2012 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's fiscal 2Q earnings.

Quote:
Cisco Systems CSCO delivered very solid fiscal second-quarter results, while management's third-quarter guidance is in line with the firm's three-year operating model. Management continues to execute well, and this quarter's strong performance demonstrates the strength of Cisco's inherent competitive advantages. We are maintaining our fair value estimate. Product revenue and services revenue each grew 11% year over year, bringing Cisco's consolidated revenue to $11.5 billion in the quarter. Services gross margins improved sequentially to just over 66%, well above our long-run forecast of 64%. Services strength is not surprising. Cisco's services business has delivered consistently strong results over the past three years, and management remains focused on expanding services faster than products. We believe that increasing network complexity and an ongoing convergence of previously disparate IT domains should provide a nice long-term tailwind for services. Cisco's ability to drive strong product revenue growth while maintaining product gross margins at 60% was a pleasant surprise. Recent data points suggested to us a relatively weak demand environment in the fourth quarter, and we had expected management to allow product gross margins to fall below 60% in order to drive top-line growth. Given the ongoing pricing pressures in China and some mix shift into lower-margin set-top boxes and servers, this quarter's gross margin stability was particularly reassuring. We think product gross margins could temporarily tick up a little higher than management's third-quarter guidance implies, as we expect a relatively benign pricing environment in switches over the next quarter. Still, we maintain our long-term view that product gr oss margins will trend moderately lower over time, as we expect Cisco to compete aggressively in China and India while offering price concessions to large cloud service providers over the next five years. Cash generation was predictably healthy. The firm produced $2.8 billion in free cash flow, and its cash balance, net of debt, increased to just under $30 billion, or roughly $5.50 per share. The company bought back $466 million in stock at an average price of $17.84 and paid out $322 million in dividends. Importantly, Cisco announced its intent to raise its quarterly dividend from $0.06 to $0.08. Management continues to demonstrate shareholder-friendly capital allocation practices, and we expect the dividend to go higher over time. Management expects year-over-year revenue growth of 5%-7% and moderately faster earnings growth in its third quarter, which is in line with its three-year financial targets. Although Cisco remains on track to outperform our 2012 earnings est imate, we believe our five-year forecast adequately captures the firm's long-run opportunities, and we are maintaining our $26 fair value estimate. Cisco still faces a number of long-run threats to its core franchises of switches and routers, and we believe increasing competition from Huawei and an ongoing shift toward cloud computing will pressure Cisco's competitive advantage--and product gross margins--over time. Still, given Cisco's balance sheet strength, improved execution, still-solid competitive position and attractive valuation, we continue to find the shares compelling at their current market price.
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 7:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Big bump, what I said aug 12th. All these guys got big benefits of dollar's fall from grace.
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 1:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's fiscal 1Q results:

Quote:
Cisco Systems CSCO executed well in its fiscal first quarter, demonstrating for the second consecutive quarter that recent initiatives to refocus on its core businesses are showing early signs of success. Revenue came in slightly ahead of our expectations, while operating margins were significantly higher than we had anticipated as Cisco continued to steadily improve gross margins across its switch portfolio. Importantly, Cisco generated double-digit year-over-year order growth across each of its key customer segments and geographies, suggesting that end market demand is well balanced and holding up relatively well. Services was an area of particular strength, making up for lackluster product revenue growth in the quarter. Cisco delivered its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit service revenue growth while maintaining service gross margins of 65.1%, and this segment accounted for 20.5% of the firm's $11.3 billion in first-quarter revenue. We expect services to account for an increasingly large portion of total revenue over our five-year explicit forecast, partially because of management's increased focus on this business and partially because of the increasing maturity of the router and switch industries. This would be a welcome mix shift, in our view, as service engagements are more predictable, lead to stickier customer relationships, and are less likely to succumb to significant pricing pressure than hardware sales. Cash generation was once again healthy. The firm produced $2.1 billion in free cash flow, and its cash balance, net of debt, remains at nearly $28 billion, or $5 per share . The company bought back $1.5 billion in stock at an average price of $15.37 per share and paid out $322 million in dividends. In aggregate, Cisco returned nearly 90% of free cash flow generated in the quarter to shareholders, and we believe that management should continue to aggressively repurchase shares while they remain undervalued. Management expects year-over-year revenue growth of 7%-8% in its second quarter, which would represent a positive first step toward its three-year annualized revenue growth target of 5%-7%. Moreover, the firm expects earnings per share growth to outpace revenue growth during the second quarter, a welcome departure from previous quarters' disappointing results. Although Cisco is on track to outperform our 2012 earnings estimate, we believe our five-year forecast adequately captures the firm's long-run opportunities, and we are maintaining our $26 fair value estimate. Cisco still faces a number of long-run threats to its core franchises of switches and routers, and we believe increasing competition from Huawei and an ongoing shift toward cloud computing will pressure Cisco's competitive advantage--and product gross margins--over time. Still, given Cisco's balance sheet strength, improved execution, still-solid competitive position and attractive valuation, we continue to find the shares compelling at their current market price.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Big "buy and hold" interests here, as well as the tech faithful. Their faith has long since bottomed and this upturn will be a good backstop to the market. Cisco punches far above its weight here.
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 11:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's fiscal 4Q results:

Quote:
Cisco's CSCO fiscal fourth-quarter results suggest that the firm's efforts to strengthen its competitive position are starting to pay off. Revenue, gross margin, and operating margin all came in slightly ahead of our expectations, and management's fiscal first-quarter guidance suggests that incremental near-term gross margin deterioration will be more than offset by operating expense reduction. We believe gross margins are beginning to stabilize, and we are maintaining our fair value estimate. Although Cisco's switch revenue fell 4% from the previous year's results to $3.4 billion, this result outperformed our expectations by more than $100 million. CEO John Chambers noted that the firm's switch port and revenue shares were stable from the previous quarter, which we believe is plausible, given recent weak quarterly results from some of Cisco's peers. Cisco's product gross margins also remained fairly stable compared with recent results, and Chambers said the firm's switch gross margins fell roughly 140 basis points in fiscal 2011 from the previous year. We continue to expect Cisco's switch business to grow, albeit slowly, and maintain that gross margins are approaching a bottom. Cisco's new product segment grew 7% from the previous year to $3.5 billion. Strong growth in collaboration, data center, and wireless was partially offset by sluggish results from the video connected home business and declines in security. The new product segment now accounts for roughly 31% of Cisco's revenue, and we expect this business to continue to outpace growth in routers and switches over time. Cash generation was once again healthy. The firm generated $2.6 billion in free cash flow, and its cash balance, net of debt, now stands at nearly $28 billion, or $5 per share. The company bought back $1.5 billion in stock at an average price of $15.85 per share and paid out $329 million in dividends. CFO Frank Calderoni said the firm would be opportunistic in its share repurchases; we would like to see Cisco accelerate its pace of buybacks while its stock remains significantly undervalued. Management expects year-over-year revenue growth of 1%-4% in its fiscal first quarter, as relatively healthy order growth from its enterprise, commercial, and service provider customer segments is being partially offset by continued weakness in the public sector. This sentiment echoes recent comments from other data networking vendors, and we expect weakness in the public sector to persist.
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PostPosted: Thu May 12, 2011 2:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's 3Q results:

http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stocknet/381137/ciscos-restructuring-begins.aspx?symbol=CSCO

Quote:
Cisco CSCO delivered fiscal third-quarter results that were above our expectations, but management's fourth-quarter revenue outlook (flat or slightly up year over year) is below our current forecast. While we are trimming our near-term revenue projections, the effect on our $30 fair value estimate is negligible. Increasing competition and restructuring efforts present significant near-term challenges, but we believe management is positioning the firm for continued earnings growth and better capital allocation over the longer term.

Switches, which accounted for 30% of Cisco's third-quarter revenue, continue to be our primary area of concern. Sales of switches grew sequentially, but fell roughly 9% from last year as the firm faces broad-based competitive pressure from Hewlett-Packard HPQ and emerging threats from Juniper JNPR and Arista in data center environments. We expect Cisco to price aggressively in high-end switches to maintain share, while ceding share in more commodified segments, such as unmanaged, low-density switches. We think this strategy makes sense over the long run as Cisco's competitive advantage is strongest in mission-critical environments within the enterprise. As we have outlined in our thesis, we expect the net effect of Cisco's strategy will be moderate share loss and ongoing gross margin pressure in switches.

Cisco also provided more clarity on its restructuring plan. Management expects to take a charge of between $500 million and $1.1 billion next quarter as a result of its recently announced early retirement program. CEO John Chambers provided more information on efforts to streamline the management structure, noting that the company has reduced the number of management councils from nine to three and the number of management boards from 42 to 15. In all, Cisco plans to remove $250 million in quarterly operating expenses by the third quarter of fiscal 2012, or roughly 6% of total operating expenses. We think it can achieve these savings with no affect on its long-run competitive position.
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 14, 2011 8:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

FLIP RIP: Was very curious about the demise of this product as Flip camera promised to be the perfect real-world analogue to YouTube in the context of a generation that only understands video.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20053337-266.html

That Cisco could kill it while still nominally profitable complicates that matter. That it doesn't carry the margins of mainstream Cisco products just underscores how rich the parent is. ....But, looming in the shadows is that other killer app: the smartphone. Android and iPhone strikes again.
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 05, 2011 7:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Night of Long Knives?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/42436591

If I bought "tech" I'd thought the recent disappointments might be a buy. Order book is loaded to the gills and Muni deleveraging will bounce back as it is this very tech that will enable them to do more with less (people).
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 1:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's 2Q earnings:

Quote:
Cisco (CSCO) dutifully beat management's revenue projection for the second quarter, but gross margins were a big disappointment. Assuming that Cisco can continue to deliver revenue growth in line with our 10%-11% expectations, and assuming that gross margins do not recover at all from the current quarter, we'd be looking at a slight haircut to our fair value estimate.

Management broke out the year-over-year decline in gross margins as follows: 100 basis points was attributable to the consumer business, which fell 15% year over year; 100 basis points was attributable to product transitions in the switching business; and 50 basis points was attributable to growth in the relatively low-margin Unified Computing System business. Weak performance in the consumer business was not surprising, as we don't view Cisco a serious player in that market. We've been expecting UCS to exert margin pressure, so that wasn't a surprise.

We think management's explanation of the weakness in switch margins was credible--the firm is rolling out several new product lines, and new products typically generate lower margins right after launch. (CEO John Chambers used the example of the Nexus 7000, which saw gross margins improve by 700 basis points over the first five quarters after launch.) We were concerned to hear that switch revenue fell 7% year over year, and while backlog is up and management expects growth to rebound over the next couple of quarters, this is something that investors should be watching under a microscope, given the importance of the switch business. That said, we've seen no evidence that Cisco is losing share in switches.

In the previous quarter, two areas--public sector and set-top boxes--caused significant pain, and that pain doesn't seem to be abating. During the conference call, Chambers struck a pessimistic note, saying that while public-sector revenue grew 7% year over year (9% in the United States), he expected the situation to worsen because of budget constraints across countries and across layers of government, and growth could dip into the low to mid-single digits.

The set-top box business continues to suffer, falling 11% year over year, with a 29% year-over-year decline in cable boxes being partially offset by a 47% increase in IPTV boxes. Chambers discussed how that business is no longer about set-top boxes and is instead a "software architecture game," but we are leaning toward the view that Cisco should examine ways to get out of that no-moat business (and the no-moat consumer business while it is at it) as long as it doesn't endanger its relationships with the telecom carriers.

While we are disappointed in the margin erosion in the quarter, our overall thesis is unchanged. Cisco continues to be well positioned in its switching and routing businesses (allowing for the product transitions and backlog increase in switching), and the areas that seem to be giving management the most heartburn are ones in which we're not thrilled it participates to begin with.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 11:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chambers on earnings disappointment:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1787502020&play=1

We don't need consumers. Europe not falling off cliff.
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 12:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's 1Q results:

Quote:
Cisco's CSCO first-quarter results, released Wednesday, were mixed and its revenue forecasts for the rest of the year were disappointing. However, we are leaving our fair value estimate unchanged. Revenue growth remained robust at 19.2%, and operating expenses remained basically flat as a percentage of revenue. The only real blemish on the quarter's financials was a gross margin contraction to 62.8% from 65.3% in the year-ago quarter as a result of price pressure and product mix. We're likely to reduce our full-year revenue forecast, but not enough to change our fair value estimate. However, Cisco's guidance for the second quarter and the full year was disappointing and resulted in what we would characterize as a fairly contentious question-and-answer session between management and analysts. Management blamed the weak forecast on three primary issues: a slowdown in government spending, European spending, and weakness in its cable television (primarily set-top boxes) business. The last issue had two components--a weak market for set-top boxes driven by languishing subscriber growth and market share losses. Cisco specifically named Motorola MOT as gaining share, but we believe smaller competitors selling no-frills set-top boxes are also gaining share. CEO John Chambers argued that there is nothing structurally wrong with Cisco, and that the firm's disappointing revenue growth for the full year (mostly because of an expected weak second quarter) is simply the result of two of the firm's business lines hitting a rough patch at the same time. He buttressed his argument by pointing to Cisco's strength in edge routing, core routing, and its nascent server business, which based on this quarter's revenue is now running at an annual revenue rate of $500 million and growing extremely rapidly. He did, however, admit that the firm was caught flat-footed by the downturn in revenue growth. Given that Cisco has a strong reputation for having forward-looking visibility into macro trends a couple of quarters out, this was very surprising. In the past, we've argued that perhaps Cisco has moved too far afield from its core businesses with some of its acquisitions, and now that discussion will probably become more heated since many of Cisco's smaller competitors, like Aruba ARUN and F5 FFIV, are blowing the doors off (and taking share from) Cisco in areas tha t are more core to Cisco's traditional networking business than some areas that it has been entering. We don't believe Cisco is broken, but we think its long-term revenue growth target of 12%-17% is overly aggressive for a firm of its size and could lead to more of these types of surprises.
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 7:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Cisco fails on government contracts and utilities. Cisco fails. And you thought you were riding the vanguard of the free market.

Proves once again there are no free markets.....and let's not even get started on that new Silicon Valley startup industry, solar.
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Morningstar on CSCO's 4Q and full-year earnings:

Quote:
Cisco CSCO reported strong revenue growth and operating margin expansion during both the fourth quarter and full-year, but management's cautious statements about the current outlook for IT spending spooked investors, and could signal a weaker fiscal year 2011. We're not changing our fair value estimate, but we may trim our fiscal year 2011 estimates by a small amount. After a weak start, Cisco finished its fiscal year 2010 on a strong note, and was generally in line with our expectations. Revenue growth squeaked in a little higher than we expected, as the firm's refreshed product portfolio gained traction. Gross margins were a little weaker than we expected on both products and services, and since they were only up marginally over their fiscal 2009 level (a year in which revenues declined nearly 9%), this suggests to us that the firm may have used aggressive pricing to close more business by quarter's end. Operating expenses were substantially lower than we expected on a combination of lower research and development, or R&D, spending, and lower amortization expenses. Despite what we saw as healthy results for the fourth quarter, a couple of data points gave us some concern that the company had to push to meet its revenue goals during the final weeks of the quarter. In addition to our guess that weaker-than-expected gross margin expansion could be signaling that the firm may have had to price a bit aggressively to close sales, the fact that accounts receivable grew nearly double the rate of revenue year-over-year suggests that either customers demanded looser terms to close deals, or that an unusual amount of business closed at the very end of the quarter. Finally, CEO John Chambers' comments during the call suggested that--after a couple of quarters of clear recovery--Cisco, and the technology hardware industry as a whole, could be headed back into rough waters. Cisco typically has excellent visibility into near-term corporate IT spending, and is often the first to note the beginning of an upward or downward cyclical swing. Given this, Chambers' words of caution (which included phrases like "unusual uncertainty" and "unusual amount of conservatism") spooked investors--especially coming on the heels of such a terrible day for technology stocks in general.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 4:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

.

Ichimoku confirmed a buy on the 1st March, but suggests caution where the Chikou potential resistance lies (yellow box). I would now expect to see a retracement just below this point

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