Cisco & Cerebras Orders Up, Stocks Down

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss:

• Cisco earnings.

• Strong hardware, weak software.

• Cerebras, making sense of its confusing earnings.

• Can innovations like Cerebras threaten the AI incumbents?

• Hidden Gems earnings lightning round.

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on Aug. 13, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: The wild ups and downs of earnings season continues. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm your host, Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors, Jon Quast and Matt Frankel. Guys, it has been a wild up and down of the second quarter. Look, we could go into the several reasons, and maybe once the earning season dies down, we'll really do a postmortem of why this seems to be happening more with the AI trade recently and the volatility of the recent stock market. But we're a little busy with earnings right now.

We had a couple of big earnings reports. We had Cisco, we had Cerebras, which is a new IPO, a lot of investor excitement around that. Then we really dug into some under-the-radar stocks, doing a little bit of a lightning round, letting us indulge our analyst tendencies a little bit here. But let's start with Cisco. Shares of Cisco are down 7.4% as we record. Considering the moves we've seen so far in the second quarter, that's actually a rather mild reaction for the stock. As with anything that's selling equipment to data centers and AI, sales growth looked great. But it seems as though the fly in the soup was related to service revenue, which came in a little lower than expected. Matt, to start with you. What stood out in the report?