Wall Street’s next big test is looming with Nvidia’s profit report

NEW YORK (AP) — How much hype is left in Nvidia’s stock? Anyone with an S&P 500 index fund is hoping to get an answer to that weighty question next week.

Nvidia has ridden Wall Street’s mania around artificial intelligence to become one of the stock market’s most massive companies, with a total value topping $3 trillion. Real money has backed the rise, and tech companies keep gobbling up Nvidia’s chips to train their AI models.

When Nvidia reports its latest quarterly results on Wednesday, analysts are looking for its revenue to have surged to $28.65 billion in the spring, up 112% from a year earlier. That would tower over the 5% growth in revenue that S&P 500 companies overall are likely to deliver for the quarter, according to FactSet.

The problem, critics say, is such stellar growth has set off too much euphoria among investors. Through the year’s first six months, Nvidia’s stock soared nearly 150%. At that point, the stock was trading at a little more than 100 times the company’s earnings over the prior 12 months. That’s much more expensive than it’s been historically and than the S&P 500 in general.

Combined with Nvidia’s big size, the blistering performance meant the chip company accounted for nearly 30% of the S&P 500’s total return for the first six months of the year. All that from just one of the 500 companies in the index, or 0.2% of its membership.

Such outsized heft showed its downside this summer, when Nvidia’s stock tumbled 27% from a peak in late June into early August. Wall Street worried that Nvidia and other Big Tech stocks had simply grown too expensive in a runup reminiscent of the 1990s tech boom, even with the caveat that they were making much more in profit than any dot-com was in the late 20th century.

Nvidia’s slide helped drag the S&P 500 down nearly 10% from its all-time high set last month. On some days, the S&P 500 fell even though the majority of stocks across Wall Street were rising. Drops for Nvidia and other influential Big Tech stocks on those days simply overwhelmed everything else.

The drops wrung out “some of the excesses” after traders crowded into bets on Nvidia and a handful of other Big Tech stocks, according to Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

Nvidia’s earnings report next week could show how much, if any, excess may be left. A good performance by Nvidia does not guarantee more gains for the stock. Just look at what happened with the parent company of Google earlier this reporting season.

Alphabet ‘s stock dropped even though it delivered both profit and revenue that topped analysts’ forecasts, a signal of just how difficult it would be for its stock to rally further.

That’s why, even when the market’s eye was on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s highly anticipated speech on Friday about interest rates, its mind was on Nvidia’s upcoming report, according to Bank of America strategists led by Ohsung Kwon.