NVIDIA Corp (NVDA)

[Brokemillwright]

Artificial intelligence, which a few years ago existed only in science fiction (check out William Gibson’s Neuromancer), has morphed into an epic stock bubble. Nvidia, maker of the leading AI microchips, saw its market cap surge from $200 billion in 2019 to $2 trillion in 2023. I haven’t actually checked, but that might be the fastest episode of paper wealth creation in human history.

So it’s possible that this sector got … ahem … a little ahead of itself. And last week it corrected brutally.

Wolf Richer just posted some charts showing how bad — and widespread — the damage was. Here’s the AI part of his article:

Nvidia [NVDA] plunged 10% today, to $762.00, the worst one-day plunge since March 2020. It’s down 21.8% from its all-time high of $974 on March 25. It became infamous here in this joint on February 24, when we honored it with a WTF Chart of the Year. At that time, Nvidia’s market cap had spiked to nearly $2 trillion, and shares to $788.

We compared it to our WTF-Charts-of-the-Year of Tesla, which a couple of years later made it into our pantheon of Imploded Stocks, though its business continued to boom, and its Model Y became the bestselling model in the world. It just meant that the mania had begun to seep out of the stock.

The minimum qualification for making it into the pantheon: the stock has to drop at least 70% from the all-time high. For NVDA to be inducted into the pantheon, the stock would have to drop to $292, and that’s not hard, that’s where it had been only 10 months ago. It was already a very high-priced stock back then. So today, we’ll honor it with a new and improved WTF chart of the year.