Thursday, August 29, 2024

Nvidia And The Keynesian Beauty Contest (NVDA)

Following on yesterday's "Nvidia Beats On Top And Bottom Lines, Shares Drop (NVDA)" and "Nvidia Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript, August 28, 2024 (NVDA)":

A repost from August 21 i.e. a week before NVDA released their Q2 numbers:

"Nvidia is nearing another milestone that would showcase its stunning growth" (NVDA)

We try to be careful with this type of writing. Speculating about a speculative investment out in public is an exercise fraught with downsides, among which is the Keynesian Beauty Contest aspect of  information on an asset price. You not only have to be right about the underlying story but also on the market's reaction to that story should it come to pass.

With that caveat, and with an awareness that NVDA has from time to time shown an almost perverse reversal of the price trend going into earnings.... One of the most dramatic was in February 2024 when a short-but-sharp downtrend reversed in dramatic fashion:

Chart Image

TradingView

That gap by the way is the one major gap that has not been filled,* the other big one from the May earnings report was filled in the early August ructions. Over the years - and we are talking every earnings report back to 2015, we've also seen the opposite occur, an up-move into Nvidia earnings reversed when the report didn't hit the whisper numbers.

So, with that cautionary tale ringing in our ears, here's MarrketWatch, August 21, 2024:

Several analysts see the company hitting the $30 billion revenue mark when it reports earnings next week. The company crossed the $20 billion threshold two quarters ago.

Nvidia Corp. keeps moving the bar higher. This time around, that could mean a new revenue milestone.

Raymond James analyst Srini Pajjuri sees the possibility of Nvidia NVDA topping $30 billion in revenue when the semiconductor company posts earnings next Wednesday afternoon. His projection is above the consensus view, which calls for $28.7 billion.

A revenue total above the $30 billion mark would highlight just how rapidly Nvidia has been able to grow — and at scale. The company first exceeded $10 billion in quarterly revenue a year ago, and it topped $20 billion in quarterly revenue during the January quarter.

Analysts see the potential for a $40 billion revenue quarter a year or so from now. The FactSet consensus models $39.6 billion in revenue for next year’s July quarter, and $42.3 billion in revenue for next year’s October quarter.

Nvidia has beaten consensus revenue expectations each quarter going back at least five years. But even if Nvidia weren’t to hit Pajjuri’s $30 billion-plus revenue mark this quarter, merely meeting the consensus view would be an impressive show of growth as it would mean revenue more than doubled from a year before. Nvidia’s growth is slowing as the company starts to lap periods that also benefitted from explosive demand for artificial-intelligence hardware, but to be able to double revenue at current levels is a rare feat....

....MUCH MORE
*
To fill that gap will take something that JPM's David Kelly called out in July:

"JPMorgan’s Kelly Says Only a Bear-Market ‘Shock’ Can Upend Tech"

$128.04 up $0.79 (0.62%) last.

*****

Well, revenues came in at $30.04 billion for the quarter but the judges of the beauty contest were all over the place in their appreciation of what they were seeing.

Our judgement: If you want to own the future, own this company. That is not a new opinion.

In late pre-market trade the stock was last at $121.56  down $4.05 (-3.22%).

*****

June 18, a walk down Memory Lane:
"Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as most valuable stock in the world" (NVDA)

Huh.

From Yahoo Finance, June 18, 2024: 

Nvidia (NVDA) overtook Microsoft (MSFT) on Tuesday as the most valuable company in the world just two weeks after it took the No. 2 spot from Apple (AAPL).

Nvidia's stock price rose about 3.5%, eclipsing $135 per share and giving the chipmaker a market capitalization over $3.33 trillion. With a 0.4% slide on Tuesday, Microsoft's market cap stood at nearly $3.32 trillion.

Shares of Nvidia are up more than 215% over the last 12 months and more than 3,400% over the last five years. Year to date, Nvidia has gained 175%; Microsoft stock is up just less than 19% in 2024.

Nvidia first crossed a $1 trillion market cap on June 13, 2023. The stock advanced north of $2 trillion on March 1, and then rapidly crossed the $3 trillion mark for the first time on June 5. The company's advance from a $1 trillion to a $3 trillion market cap was the fastest on record.

Nvidia's surge has made it a top weighting in the S&P 500 (^GSPC), and the chipmaker has served a pivotal role in the benchmark index hitting record highs in 2024.

Up until May, the S&P 500 had traded with a near-perfect correlation to Nvidia's price movement, meaning that as Nvidia's stock rose, so did the broader index. As of Monday, Nvidia's stock gains alone had contributed about one-third of the S&P 500's year-to-date rise, according to data from Citi's equity research team.

Nvidia completed a 10-for-1 split on June 10.

The company's rise comes amid the generative AI explosion that kicked off when OpenAI debuted its ChatGPT platform in late 2022. Nvidia's chips, modified graphics cards, and CUDA software platform are designed to both train and run AI programs, giving it a strategic advantage that experts say will take rivals AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC) years to overcome.

Nvidia is the tech industry's go-to supplier for AI chips and integrated software....

....MUCH MORE

It seems like yesterday we were pitching Nvidia as the brains of your car, but it was actually going-on a decade ago:

May 2015
Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)

We've mentioned, usually in the context of the Top 500* fastest supercomputers, that:
Long time readers know we have a serious interest in screaming fast computers and try to get to the Top500 list a couple times a year. Here is a computer that was at the top of that list, the fastest computer in the world just four years ago. And it's being shut down.
Technology changes pretty fast. 
That was from a 2013 post.

Among the fastest processors in the business are the one's originally developed for video games and known as Graphics Processing Units or GPU's. Since Nvidia released their Tesla hardware in 2008 hobbyists (and others) have used GPU's to build personal supercomputers.
Here's Nvidias Build your Own page.
Or have your tech guy build one for you.

In addition Nvidia has very fast connectors they call NVLink.
Using a hybrid combination of IBM Central Processing Units (CPU's) and Nvidia's GPU's, all hooked together with the NVLink, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is building what will be the world's fastest supercomputer when it debuts in 2018.

As your kid plays Grand Theft Auto....

 A bit more troubling was April 2018's "UPDATED—NVIDIA Wants to Be the Brains Behind the Surveillance State (NVDA)"

In 2015 we started using a boilerplate intro to the company, here's a 2016 version saying "Focus on the AI/Machine Learning":

NVIDIA: Don't Buy the Stock For The Autonomous Car Stuff (or virtual reality) NVDA; TSLA; IBM

The stock is up $2.21 (+2.64%) at $85.85. [divide that by 4 to account for the stock split in 2021] {also divide by 10 for the most recent split}
Yesterday the usually very reliable Investor's Business Daily headlined a story "Nvidia Upgraded On Growth In Car, Cloud, Virtual Reality Fields". As we say in our standard intro to the stock:
Before we go any further, our NVIDIA boilerplate:  
We make very few calls on individual names on the blog but this one is special. 
They are positioned to be the brains in autonomous vehicles, they will drive virtual reality should it ever catch on, the current businesses include gaming graphics, deep learning/artificial intelligence, and supercharging the world's fastest supercomputers including what will be the world's fastest at Oak Ridge next year.
 
Not just another pretty face.  
Or food delivery app.

It worked out.

NVDA NVIDIA Corporation monthly Stock Chart

 March 22, 2024:

I Have Heard Of This Nvidia You Speak Of (first call for a $10 trillion market cap) NVDA

I have heard wondrous tales of immense wealth,

Of amazing deeds performed as if by magic.

Yes I have heard*of all of this....but hang on one 'effin minute with the $10 trillion talk. Let's get to $1000 on the stock before we join Coleridge at the hookah. [In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...]