Moscow, Russia - April 7, 2019: NVIDIA microchip on the motherboard

NVIDIA microchip (Getty Images)

Nvidia’s $4T trading activity shows unparalleled stock market dominance

Its peers aren’t even close.

5/30/24 10:28AM

It’s been about a year since Nvidia’s blowout quarterly results and robust outlook signaled that the AI boom was on.

The run-up to that fateful May 2023 earnings report also marks the time when Nvidia began to dominate trading activity across the US stock market: there’s a chasm between the amount of money that is changing hands trading the semiconductor company compared to other top US stocks.

The dollar value in shares of Nvidia — that is, the number of shares traded times the price each transaction took place at — has been higher than that of Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon on more than 96% of the past 262 trading sessions.

This trend kicked into overdrive in 2024. Nvidia has traded more dollar volume versus any of those names in all but two days this year, both of which were following the release of earnings reports by Meta. For reference, in 2022, Apple topped this leaderboard on about 80% of occasions.

Year to date, through May 29, $4.1 trillion has changed hands in Nvidia stock. Its peers aren’t even close.

But Nvidia isn’t just trading more than other tech titans individually — increasingly, it’s trading more than all of them as a group.

40 times so far this year, Nvidia’s stock traded more dollar volume than Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook combined. For context, Amazon has done that once since the end of 2019, and Apple has accomplished the same feat twice over that span. That’s it.

Marc Andreessen proclaimed that software is eating the world back in 2011. Well, right now, Nvidia’s H100 semiconductors are swallowing the US stock market.

Luke Kawa4h

Corning spikes after Nvidia invests $500 million in the fiber-optics company

Corning is spiking after Nvidia dropped $500 million for the right to buy up to 18 million of its shares.

The deal comes as part of a multiyear partnership that will see Corning “increase its U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10x and expand its U.S. fiber production capacity by more than 50% to meet the accelerating demand driven by AI factory buildouts,” per the press release.

The deal is structured around Corning issuing Nvidia two types of warrants:

“Pre-funded” warrants for 3 million Corning shares (which account for the bulk of the $500 million to the fiber-optics company).
“Traditional” warrants that enable Nvidia to buy 15 million shares at $180, thereby benefiting from Corning’s share price trading above that level within three years’ time (unless this partnership is terminated or Corning makes a “fundamental transaction” before that). If and when Nvidia exercises those warrants in full, CEO Jensen Huang will be cutting a much heftier check to Corning.

So while on the surface this deal may not look as big as Nvidia’s recent $2 billion investments in Marvell Technology, Coherent, and Lumentum, once all the dust settles, it could turn out to be considerably more!

Luke Kawa

AMD’s spike reveals just how central CPUs are to the AI boom

“The world has changed, amid sentiment that the CPU growth trajectory has changed,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore.

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Processor close up in the black motherboard CPU socket. Advanced Micro Devices is an American semiconductor company

Helena Cheng5h

AMC gains as strong Q1 results give breathing room for balance sheet improvements

AMC shares are rising in early Wednesday trading after the theater chain reported Q1 earnings results with revenue exceeding estimates after the bell Tuesday.

Key numbers:

Revenue of $1.05 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $972.6 million).
Adjusted EBITDA of $38.3 million (estimate: $7.7 million).

Attendance reached 30.7 million in the US and 16.9 million internationally, with improving demand thanks to recently released movies like “Project Hail Mary,” “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” and “Michael.”

A prolonged string of positive operating results like these will be needed to improve AMC’s balance sheet over time. AMC is still carrying around $4 billion in debt, which management is aiming to refinance and pay down over time.

“Refinancing has bought time to delever amid the stop-and-go box-office rebound as film supply is set to improve,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kevin Near and Geetha Ranganathan wrote in the wake of this release. “AMC expects to close more underperforming theaters this year and hinted that positive free cash flow may hinge on a strong 2027 movie slate.”

Analysts at Benchmark upgraded the stock to “buy” from “hold” following these Q1 results.

Rani Molla

Uber Q1 earnings, Q2 guidance come in above Wall Street estimates

Uber reported earnings before the bell Wednesday.