Clearly wrong

Back at the end of July, in this post on artificial intelligence (AI), I highlighted a few technology stocks related to AI that may be worth looking at in a market downturn. I named Nvidia (NVDA), Google/Alphabet (GOOG) and Baidu (BIDU). Well, I followed through on two of these calls at the end of October and bought into GOOGL and NVDA. I am just still too nervous about investing in a Chinese firm like BIDU given the geopolitical and trade tensions. I am reasonably happy about the GOOGL trade but after their awful results last night I quickly got out of NVDA this morning, taking a 17% hit.

Last quarter CEO Jensen Huang said the following:

A lot of gamers at night, they could — while they’re sleeping, they could do some mining. And so, do they buy it for mining or did they buy it for gaming, it’s kind of hard to say. And some miners were unable to buy our OEM products, and so they jumped on to the market to buy it from retail, and that probably happened a great deal as well. And that all happened in the last — the previous several quarters, probably starting from late Q3, Q4, Q1, and very little last quarter, and we’re projecting no crypto-mining going forward.

Last night, they guided their Q4 gaming revenue down sequentially by a massive $600 million, about a third, to clear inventory of their mid-range Pascal GPU chips and warned that the crypto hangover could take a few quarters to clear. CEO Jensen Huang said “we were surprised, obviously. I mean, we’re surprised by it, as anybody else. The crypto hangover lasted longer than we expected.” That was some surprise!!

All the bull analyst calls on NVDA have been shown up badly here. Goldman Sachs, who only recently put the stock on their high conviction list, quickly withdrew them from the list with the comment that they were “clearly wrong”! My back of the envelop calculations suggest that the 2019 and 2020 consensus EPS estimates of $7.00 and $8.00 pre-last night’s Q3 results could be impacted down by 15% and 20% respectively. Many analysts are only taking their price targets down to the mid to low $200’s. With the stock now trading around the $160s, I could see it going lower, possibly into the $120’s if this horrible market continues. And that’s why I just admitted defeat and got out.

All bad trades, like this NVDA one, teach you something. For me, its don’t get catch up in the hype about a strong secular trend like AI, particularly as we are clearly in a late market cycle. NVDA is a remarkable firm and its positioning in non-gaming markets like data-centres and auto as well as the potential of its new Turing gaming chips mean that it could well be a star of the future. But I really don’t understand the semi-conductor market and investing in a market you really don’t understand means you have to be extremely careful. Risk management and sizing of positions is critical. So, don’t get caught up in hype (here is an outrageous example of AI hype on Micron).

Strangely, I find it a physiological relief to sell a losing position: it means I don’t have to be reminded of the mistake every time I look at my portfolio and I can be more unemotional about ever considering re-entering a stock. I don’t think I will have to consider NVDA again for several quarters!

Lesson learned. Be careful out there.