Investors have been watching the meteoric rise of Nvidia Corp. with amazement, though some with trepidation over concerns the AI darling could give back some of that meteoric rise after blowout earnings reported earlier this week.
But a new study from Citigroup finds that even when large capitalization stocks rally into earnings, they tend to keep on rising, meaning bulls of Nvidia
NVDA,
and the fast-growing technology can probably stick to their guns.
“The AI bubble is not in trouble, and, if anything, earnings performance suggests that it is less of a bubble to begin with,” said a team of quantitative strategists led by Alex Saunders.
Crucial for Nvidia investors, they found that if a stock performance is up more than 10% on earnings day, “those large-caps with strong performance into earnings continue to perform very well for the next three months.”
Nvidia stock soared 16% on Thursday, adding $277 billion in market cap, the largest such one-day gain for any company ever. Shares did suffer a four-day selloff in the run-up to those results, but have largely been unstoppable since a technology sector pullback in October.
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The Citi strategists studied 30 years of data on S&P 500 index constituents, looking at 1,120 tickers for rallies of 35% or more, three months ahead of respective earnings — Nvidia rose 39%. They also filtered for big companies that were more than five times the median market cap at the time.
That cut the potential universe to 200 companies from over 100,000, with a “wide dispersion” in post-earnings returns. But stock performances were marginally positive over the next three months, after a very marginal pullback four days after earnings — a median 2.4% drop.
“The consensus that after an extreme run up shares are set for a disappointment is not true in the median case, although the study contains a number of companies which disappointed the market’s expectations. If anything, strong earnings suggest that the current run up is less of a bubble than is feared,” said Saunders and the team.
But the analysts also admit that strong rallies such as that seen by Nvidia following earnings are somewhat rare. They found only nine instances — all tech names that typically happened during 2000-era bubbles. Those shares tended to continue on a much stronger path, and were up a further 27% over the next months.
As for where to invest, Saunders and his team remain overweight on U.S. equities and the tech sector, and the tech-heavy Korean and Taiwan stock markets — the Kospi
KR:180721
is up just 0.4% so far this year, while the Taiex
TW:Y9999
has climbed 5%.
“We continue to believe that this is the right strategy, as in the early days of a new technology, the shovel sellers benefit more than the gold miners. While this eventually changes, we are still early in the AI rollout.”
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