Earnings Preview: Microsoft & How To Trade It (MSFT, DELL, HPQ, INTC)

Microsoft Corporation

is set to report earnings tonight after the bell, and Wall Street will be looking to see if the ever present "Win-Tel" monopoly isn't as dead as everyone thought, especially after Intel

reported blow out earnings last week. Analysts will be looking for the Washington-based company to earn 56 cents per share on revenues of $16.19 billion. This up from last year, when the company reported 45 cents per share on revenues of $14.50 billion, growing at 11.7%. The stock has been in the dog house for years, and as such, now sports a 2.4% dividend yield, and trades at 9.67 times 2012 earnings. If Microsoft is able to report better than expected earnings, and show that the company isn't just a pile of cash, and can actually innovate, then names like Dell

, Hewlett-Packard

and Intel should see a little bit of a boost in after-hours trading. The company is also cheap on a price to earnings growth ratio, trading at a 1.00 PEG ratio. It sits on a mountain of cash, nearly $40 billion, and has some $10 billion in debt, so the cash is there to cover the debt and perhaps make a major acquisition or two. Microsoft Corporation develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a range of software products and services for various computing devices worldwide.