Nvidia’s not just lapping other chip stocks. It’s running the table on the Magnificent Seven.
The relationship between the daily swings in Nvidia and other megacap tech stocks has virtually disappeared despite the fact that many of them are its biggest customers.
Nvidia isn’t just breaking away from its competitors in the semiconductor industry with an eye-popping run of recent gains.
It’s also setting itself apart from another set of peers: the so-called Magnificent Seven of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla.
Apple, the Magnificent Seven component that’s done the second-best over the past month, is still 20 percentage points behind Nvidia’s whopping 24% gain.
In the process, the relationship between the daily swings in Nvidia and the other megacap tech companies has effectively gone to zero. The 21-day average pairwise correlation between the percent change in Nvidia versus the other six of the Mag Seven has dropped from 60% at the start of October to less than 7% as of the close on Monday. That’s the lowest level since early to mid-July, when the correlation was actually negative. Soon thereafter, tech stocks had a correlations-to-one move as investors rotated into small caps, resulting in a pullback for the S&P 500.
I’ve maintained that it’s very curious whenever Nvidia is able to trade so independently of other tech titans, given that many of these are its most important customers. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta are widely assumed to be the four companies that make up roughly half of Nvidia’s sales. The chip designer needs those companies to be raking in so much cash from their business operations that they can justify spending tens of billions of dollars on AI without batting an eye.
The relationship between Nvidia and its cash-flush customers is charitably symbiotic, where its chip sales will facilitate massive cost savings down the road, or at best temporarily parasitic until the economic cycle turns or there’s sufficient evidence that the returns on AI investments don’t make the juice worth the squeeze.
