Nvidia Reaction Speaks Volumes — Here’s How To Trade It

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In the past two years, there has been a battle between new and old tech. Old dogs like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) needed to learn new tricks in order to compete in this new tech era where companies like Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) are all the rage. The aforementioned two did but some like IBM (NASDAQ:IBM) still are trying to make the turn. The cloud is where all tech wants to be.

Nvdia (NASDAQ:NVDA) skirts the line between the new and the old tech. Last year, it caught the attention of Wall Street as the new king of the chip jungle. But since its peak of $290 per share last October, it got cut in more than half. And even through yesterday, not many were suggesting any reason to own it. This, to me, was a sign to dip my toe in the Nvidia stock waters.

When management guided down in January, they set the default consensus that NVDA stock is doomed, so they caused the stock to run out of incremental sellers. This is the same as saying that the weak hands are all out already. When that happens, usually a stock will need significantly worse new reasons to fall further.

This notion is proven right today, as the stock is rallying on relatively bad news. Last night NVDA reported earnings and they missed on a few metrics, yet they beat on revenue and earnings, and the stock rose on the headline. Investors now believe that they are rectifying the sales mix that plagued them last year.

Fundamentally, Nvidia stock at $290 was very frothy. But when it fell from grace, it became a bargain compared to what it was before. It now sports a trailing-12-months price-to-earnings ratio of 21 and for a growth company that is very reasonable. Compare this to Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), AMZN or Chipotle (NYSE:CMG). These wall street darlings’ P/E are 133, 80 and 96 respectively.

If you compare NVDA to its competitors, it is twice as expensive as Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) but more than three times cheaper than Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD). So any which way you consider it, it’s not grossly over priced. Owning it here means that I would be buying value for it to appreciate over time.

Part of what caused its demise was its ties to the Crypto-craze of 2018. Speculators used its chips to mine bitcoins and other Crypto-currencies. But since the prices of those collapsed, that made mining them a losing proposition. NVDA suffered sales mix issues that dragged sentiment down as a whole. Add to this that overall the markets last year were hideous then it was normal to over-react on the downside just like they did on the upside.

By now, these ties to bitcoin are dead and traders can fall back in love with NVDA’s core competency once more. This is a momentum stock, as you can clearly see from the 12-month price range, so it won’t give us clear entry points. All I know is that over time, stocks of quality companies will rise. So this is a relatively safe spot to buy a starter position of NVDA stock. If I already own it, depending on my base price I could add to it to average down.

For those who use options, I like to sell puts below support levels to generate income. This means that I commit to buying the shares below and if it indeed falls then I buy them at that price. Otherwise I would have generated income out of thin air.

Another way to use options is to sell covered calls. So if I own shares I can create my own dividends. This hedges my longs a bit by betting against my asset. Some even like to buy the shares for the purpose of writing calls against them.

The bottom line is that Nvida is a great American company and it is working its way back into Wall Street’s favor. Currently there are a lot of analysts who have a “hold” rating on the stock, so some of them may want to rejoin the bull herd and upgrade the stock. It currently trades well below their average price target around $188.

Nicolas Chahine is the managing director of SellSpreads.com. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. You can follow him as @racernic on Twitter and Stocktwits.

Nicolas Chahine is the managing director of SellSpreads.com.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2019/02/nvidia-reaction-speaks-volumes-here-is-how-to-trade-nimg/.

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