Topic: How To Invest

Wall Street Stock Forecaster Hotline – Friday, September 20, 2024

Article Excerpt

MICROSOFT CORP., $435.16, Nasdaq symbol MSFT, remains a buy for aggressive investors. The company is the world’s largest computer software firm. Its main product is the Windows operating system, which powers about 85% of the world’s personal computers. Its other main product—its Office suite, with its word processor (Word), spreadsheets (Excel) and slide presentations (PowerPoint)—controls over half of its market. Microsoft is now raising your quarterly dividend by 10.7%. Starting with the December 2024 payment, investors will receive $0.83 a share instead of $0.75. Thanks to strong investor interest in its artificial intelligence software and cloud computing services, the stock has jumped over 35% in the past year, which is why the new annual rate of $3.32 yields just 0.8%. The company also announced a new plan to buy back up to $60 billion of its outstanding shares. That’s equal to 2% of its $3.3 trillion market cap (the total value of all outstanding shares). There are no time limits for those purchases…