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Nvidia’s earnings report will test how much hype is left in the S&P 500 super stock
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Nvidia’s earnings report will test how much hype is left in the S&P 500 super stock

How big is the hype surrounding Nvidia stock? Anyone who owns an S&P 500 index fund is hoping to get an answer to this important question next week.

Nvidia has capitalized on Wall Street’s mania for artificial intelligence to become one of the largest publicly traded companies, with a total value of over $3 trillion. The rise has been backed by real money, and tech companies continue to buy Nvidia’s chips to train their AI models.

When Nvidia reports its latest quarterly results on Wednesday, analysts expect spring revenue to have risen to $28.65 billion, up 112 percent from a year earlier. That would outpace the 5 percent revenue increase that S&P 500 companies as a whole are expected to post for the quarter, according to FactSet.

The problem, critics say, is that such rapid growth has created too much euphoria among investors. In the first six months of the year, Nvidia’s stock rose in value by almost 150 percent. At that point, the stock was trading at just over 100 times the company’s earnings in the previous twelve months. That’s much more expensive than ever before and than the S&P 500 in general.

Combined with Nvidia’s enormous size, the outperformance meant that the chip company accounted for nearly 30% of the S&P 500’s total return in the first six months of the year – and that came from just one of the 500 companies in the index, or 0.2% of its members.

That outsized weight showed its dark side this summer, when Nvidia stock plunged 27 percent from its peak in late June to early August. Wall Street feared that shares of Nvidia and other big technology companies had simply become too expensive in a run that recalled the tech boom of the 1990s, even with the caveat that they were making far more profit than any dot-com company in the late 20th century.

Nvidia’s plunge helped push the S&P 500 down nearly 10% from its all-time high last month. On some days, the S&P 500 fell even as most stocks on Wall Street rose. The declines in Nvidia and other influential Big Tech stocks simply overwhelmed everything else on those days.

The price declines have “eliminated some of the excesses” after traders flocked to Nvidia and a handful of other major technology stocks, said Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

Nvidia’s earnings report next week could show how much, if anything, is left. A good performance from Nvidia doesn’t guarantee further gains for the stock. Just look at what happened to Google’s parent company earlier this earnings season.

Alphabet shares fell even though the company beat analysts’ forecasts for both earnings and revenue, a sign of how difficult it may be for the stock price to continue rising.

That’s why, according to Bank of America strategists led by Ohsung Kwon, the market’s eyes were on Nvidia’s upcoming report, even as eyes were on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s highly anticipated speech on interest rates on Friday.

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