On stock prices and Nvidia
Yesterday’s analysis of Nvidia’schallneges triggered a surge of mail from readers. The company has lost about half of its value over the past two months, and has mostly blamed a “crypto hangover” for the problem. But as I pointed yesterday, it’s really the three Cs: “Crypto, customers, and China.” There are nuances here worth exploring though.
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Rapacious capitalists and short-termism
One major vein of reader feedback was around the remarkable short-termism of my analysis, which (mostly) looked at Nvidia over the past 60 days. As a reader named Stephen wrote to me:
By focusing on the peak price from this summer and its fall you ignore the fact that the stock price today is nearly the same as it was in June of 2017. Nvidia was on a huge run because of Bitcoin and the associated run on GPUs by miners. With the crypto currency market in decline so is the demand for advanced GPUs.
There is nothing Nvidia can do about that. They profited greatly from that blip and now they are returning to normal.
That’s entirely fair. After diving in the 2008 financial crisis along with the rest of the market, Nvidia’s market cap steadily gained value for nearly seven years, growing from around $3.6 billion in 2008 to around $15 billion at the end of 2015, far outpacing the S&P 500 or other standard benchmarks.
As the crypto craze took off in 2016 though, that fairly linear growth became exponential. T
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