First up, from Yahoo Finance, August 10:
Tech: Nvidia earnings 'big catalyst' to watch for investors
As data has taken a backseat in driving markets, hype around AI and big tech has taken over. Is that a trend that will continue? Truist Chief Market Strategist Keith Lerner joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the tech sector, the outlook for tech, and what to watch with regard to earnings.
Lerner sees Nvidia (NVDA) as the key to watch for the tech industry. Lerner said, "The big catalyst to be watching August 23 is Nvidia's earnings. That kicked off, like wow this AI is really potentially real for earnings. So they have a high bar to pass."
Lerner added, "Nvidia is capturing the majority of that AI earnings boom right up front. Where do we see the follow through from others? ... Those earnings may not be coming through right away. It's going to be a longer term process."
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: As data has taken a back seat in driving market's, hype around artificial intelligence and big tech has taken over. Is that still going to keep going? It's been a tough month so far for two of the biggest names in tech-- Apple and Nvidia. Both stocks have pulled back. They're possibly heading into correction after posting massive gains in the months prior. Keith Lerner is still with us. Keith, tech is one of the sectors you like.
KEITH LERNER: Mm-hmm.
JULIE HYMAN: So presumably you're not so worried about the pullback in some of these large cap names, or how are you framing your thoughts around it?
KEITH LERNER: Sure. So we upgraded tech in March. And the way we're thinking about tech is as you think about intermediate term if the economy does slow down somewhat. We still think some of these rate hikes are going to have an impact. I think it's been delayed that companies are going to continue to have to pay on tech spending regardless just to keep up with the competitors or they can be left behind. So I think tech is OK.
I think the problem with tech, as we all know, it got top heavy. We had 40% gains in the tech sector. And I also think it needs a resting period. So I mean, short-term, after Apple's earnings last week, it feels a little bit heavy. So we just think it's also going to be consolidating here. I think the overall long-term outlook looks stronger. Technical trends have weakened here a little bit.
And I think that's the other challenge with the market. You asked earlier what's the catalyst to move this market much higher? You need tech to re-engage, right? Because tech communications discretionary are about 45% of the market. So if-- say what's going to move the market higher, you need that to re-engage.
Maybe the big catalyst to be watching is, I think, August 23rd is Nvidia's earnings, right? That kicked off the-- you know, like wow, this AI is really potentially real in some ways for earnings, so they have a high bar to pass. But that's the other thing we'll be looking for. And in the interim, what we've been doing really since June, the average stock, the equal weighted index had underperformed the S&P on a three-month basis by the most we've seen in about 30 years....
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On NVIDIA specifically, something that won't show up in the numbers until the next quarterly report, from The Register, August 11:
Chinese web giants go on $5B Nvidia shopping spree to fuel AI ambitions
In the ML arms race, GPUs are the ammunition
China's largest web and cloud providers are lining up to buy as many Nvidia GPUs as they can while they still can get their hands on them.
Just as the White House announced fresh restrictions on US tech investments in the Middle Kingdom, a report emerged claiming that Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent have collectively ordered 100,000 Nvidia A800 GPUs worth roughly $1 billion. A nerfed version of Nv's now three-year-old A100, the A800 was developed to circumvent performance limits on the export of American AI accelerators into China....
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Finally, NVIDIA seems quite proud of this upgrade to the already high-performance Grace Hopper's, August 8:
NVIDIA Unveils Next-Generation GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip Platform for Era of Accelerated Computing and Generative AI
World’s First HBM3e Processor Offers Groundbreaking Memory, Bandwidth; Ability to Connect Multiple GPUs for Exceptional Performance; Easily Scalable Server Design
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