Nvidia shows it is unbeatable for now
'Blackwell is not a chip, but a platform'.
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
That was the main message from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last Monday during his no less than two-hour (!) presentation at the Nvidia developer conference GTC AI. Reuters summarized the main news facts well, those who want to stay somewhat abreast of developments in the field of AI I especially recommend watching the short summary of Huang's speech. All the brave words from Google, Microsoft and Amazon notwithstanding, it does not look like any other company will be able to match the performance of Nvidia chips in the coming years.
The robotics side of Nvidia is also becoming increasingly interesting. CNET made this nice video comparing Nvidia's approach to Tesla's robotics strategy.
Probably the high expectations were already priced into the stock price, because Nvidia shares did not do spectacularly for the rest of the week. Indeed, Broadcom rose faster but that was overshadowed by the misadventures of Super Micro: which was included in the S&P 500 due to its massive share price appreciation over the last year, announced it was raising financing and then SMCI shares plunged over 12%.
Apple loses a lot compared to the S&P 500
It is nice to take a look at Apple's stock as well, given all the developments. That is performing dramatically, purely because investors no longer see growth and new products that have serious impact on sales have not yet been presented. But a P/E ratio of 26 is extremely low, even taking into account that Microsoft has a P/E ratio of 36. Microsoft's profit margin is higher; still, the lack of revenue growth seems to be a particular problem for Apple among investors.
Otherwise, it was an unspectacular week for leading tech stocks. The crypto world is watching with trepidation a likely investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into Ethereum, examining whether Ethereum should be classified as a security. That would mean that all regular securities laws would come into effect for Ethereum, and that would greatly depress its price.
Reddit opens strong and drops second day
Reddit went public this week and opened unexpectedly strong, at the upper end of its expected price: the stock was priced at $34 as its opening price. The first price day closed at $50.44 which can be called a downright spectacular first price day, but closed the second day lower, at $46.
Reddit stock is for speculators. Websites that run on advertising and don't have the ad volume of Meta or Google (see Elon Musk's X) face structural headwinds, so Reddit's big losses make sense. That's why the stock price is downright surprising. RDDT can't really be called a value stock.