I’ve recently bought a couple lots of Cisco (CSCO) from $27.50 to $29.50, thinking that I had near term support at $27.  As of this writing, CSCO has broken through the $27 level, and now sits near $26.25, which surprised me.  Normally, you’re supposed to sell when a stock breaks a support level, but I’m thinking of this as a long term position (at least one year), so I won’t try to sell it and pick it up cheaper.

I had thought that the sell off from $34, after their last earnings announcement where they beat their quarterly number but the stock sold off 10% nonetheless, was overdone and that the $27 to $29 range represented a good buying opportunity.

For example, SeekingAlpha picked up this BusinessWeek story in December 2007 on AT&T’s order (up to $500 million worth) to upgrade its network.

Here are some highlights of that bullish article:

• What’s noteworthy isn’t simply the size of the deal but the vast amount of bandwidth it represents. When Cisco brought out its top-of-the-line router in 2004, many analysts felt it was so powerful that only a handful of companies would ever buy one. Now, AT&T (T) plans to link 25 cities with these mighty machines to help it handle the rising tide of Net traffic—particularly video.
• Now other telcos and cable companies, located everywhere from Korea to Bulgaria, are flooding Cisco with orders—and helping realize its dream of conquering the telecom market, long a domain of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Ericsson (ERICY), and Nortel (NT).
• Thanks to all this activity, Cisco has been grabbing market share. Its piece of service provider sales has grown from 7.5% to 8.4% between the second quarter of 2007 and the same period last year, according to IDC. That growth has come at the expense Alcatel-Lucent, establishing Cisco as the world’s fourth-largest equipment provider for carriers, a bump from No. 5 last year. As telcos jump into video services, they’re replacing separate voice, data, and video networks with a single one based on Internet technology.