It’s clear that this tech giant is facing significant challenges. This week, NVIDIA Corporation experienced three major setbacks affecting its stock price. First, a stock price correction followed a “bubble land” comment from Elliot Management. Second, there was news of a potential antitrust investigation related to the Run:ai acquisition and Nvidia’s strong position in the high-end chip market. Lastly, an insider report revealed delays in shipping its Blackwell product line to major clients like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms due to a possible design flaw, which has forced the company to conduct new test production runs with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
I believe this represents an excellent opportunity for patient investors who have been waiting for the right time to buy this stock.I identified three lesser-known catalysts that I believed will allow the company to keep growing at a faster pace than its peers: one, its R&D profile, which I outlined in some detail; two, its operational efficiency and pricing power; and three, its unique human capital structure.
These three catalysts are still very much in play, and that thesis extends today to an upgrade to Strong Buy for yet another three reasons: one, the sell-off is overdone, in my opinion; two, I believe Street analysts' concerns are based purely on what appear to be excessive valuations; and three, I think the bad news on a possible antitrust probe and the delayed shipments aren't going to impact the long-term growth trajectory of this company.
Let's begin with the obvious elephant in the room; not the largest, perhaps, but definitely something that investors have been worried about - the excessive valuation leading to an overdone correction. I'll follow that up with arguments supporting the other two extensions to my thesis, as outlined above.
1: The Correction is Understandable and Expected; Take Advantage of It
Any investor who thought NVDA's stock price is going to have a straight-line, upward-sloping trajectory is only kidding themselves. When a stock is priced at such nosebleed levels, corrections are only normal. The key point here is that NVDA might have been priced for perfection, but that's the market's own fault. It's only natural that corrections happen to bring prices back down to earth.
if you look at NVDA's valuation on a revenue basis, you'll see that the forward P/S ratio has actually been moving sideways, albeit in a wide range. On a split-adjusted basis, the stock is trading at the level it was in early 2022, before the AI craze took over. Moreover, looking at the kind of revenue generation that the company exhibited, its revenue multiple actually formed a trough between then and now. As for the price return, is 440% (including the recent drop over the past month) not good enough to warrant that kind of valuation? I think it is.
It's only reasonable to call a stock overvalued if the business can't deliver superior performance that's in line with its valuation, and NVDA has been spot on with that metric. Not only have revenues growth by astounding leaps and bounds, but the bottom line has been growing almost twice as fast.As an investor, these are the metrics you should be worried about because that's what you're paying for. Remember, you're not paying for valuation; you're paying for value, and NVDA has clearly shown that it's a value creator.
it might look like a falling knife, and I say let it fall, and fall right into your portfolio! If you want to be cautious and think it'll go down even further, dollar-cost average into a cheaper cost basis over time if you have to, but don't lose this opportunity.
2: AI is NOT a "Bubble"
As for the downgrade by Elliot Management, I see that as nothing more than a gross misunderstanding of how the AI story will play out over the next several decades. We're only beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities. Yes, I agree that not every AI product is going to lead to an immediate surge in revenues for hyperscalers, but that view is extremely shortsighted, in my opinion.
One argument I can get behind is that the larger players aren't going to keep ordering AI chips in such volumes. One of the reasons for that could be the cost of NVDA's chips, but then again, if they're willing to spend on such an expensive product line up, they must have a very good reason. I think the company has a very astute pricing strategy to address this demand pull; since their line-up is currently and unarguably the best-in-class available at the moment, it does deserve premium pricing.
What the detractors to this assumption are missing is that once these hyperscalers show tangible topline growth from AI initiatives, other, smaller companies are going to follow suit. They may look for cheaper alternatives that companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) may offer in the future, but if they need to be at the top of their segments and well ahead of the competition, they'll need to invest in such capex premiums.
Therefore, while I do agree that Nvidia's AI revenues are currently concentrated among the top cloud providers and hyperscalers, we're eventually going to see it spread out to other cohorts that are waiting on the sidelines for cheaper alternatives that perform just as well. In truth, that might be a long wait, and as it becomes increasingly urgent to cater to end-users' demand for AI products, the pressure will be on these CEOs and CFOs to release funds to companies like NVDA and AMD. That's why I'm also bullish on the latter, as I made known in my article on Advanced Micro Devices last month.
The narrative about companies like Nvidia being "overhyped" and in "bubble land" is not new. Sell-side analysts are extremely cautious about being wrong, especially when institutional investors have high visibility into the securities in question - and what's more visible than the Magnificent 7 at the moment, which NVDA arguably rules over?
Nvidia's institutional ownership is at 65%, or about two thirds of all outstanding shares.
Investment firms often tend to look at short-term stock price movements and medium-term scenarios, and my assumption is that the general market downturn that began the day before the CPI report came out on July 11 triggered a decline that's continued until now, and this perceived triple-threat to NVDA is part of that larger narrative that Elliot Management has interpreted as a bubble situation. Logically, however, it also implies that the narrative itself is not directly related to NVDA but the broader Magnificent 7, which is why the stock has been impacted to such a degree over the past month.
This second part of my thesis, therefore, is that the company is NOT in bubble land because revenues aren't suddenly going to drop off the cliff. These investments are made well in ad