In the last 50 trading sessions, more than $40 billion worth of Nvidia stock has been changing hands per day, more than Tesla and Apple combined
All eyes are on Nvidia today, as the best performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2024 so far (+159% year-to-date) prepares to release its Q2 earnings.
Those earnings have become a phenomenon, not just because they’ll add another data point to a series of charts about the company that are increasingly remarkable, but because the quarterly updates have taken on a life of their own.
Billions of dollars have been wagered in options markets ahead of the announcement, implying another big move up or down in Nvidia stock (about ~10% based on the latest data), and there’s even an Nvidia earnings watch party at a New York city bar this afternoon. Yesterday, more people searched Google for “nvidia” than they did for “donald trump”, “kamala harris”, or “taylor swift”.
That’s just the sort of hullabaloo that you can expect when you become Wall Street’s most traded stock, a crown which Nvidia took from Tesla earlier this year. Indeed, data from FactSet reveals that in the last 50 trading sessions, people were trading more than $40 billion of Nvidia stock per day. Tesla, which for a long time was the go to instrument of choice for speculation in equities, is trading “just” $22.8 billion a day. Even Apple, which is still technically a more valuable company than both, is only averaging $13 billion a day.
Of course, it’s not just Nvidia’s share price that depends on the upcoming release: the fortunes of many other companies that have ridden the AI wave are wrapped up in it, as Nvidia has become the metaphorical, and often literal, talisman for AI stocks.
Nvidia releases its earnings today (August 28th) after the bell. Analysts are expecting a 143% jump in profit to more than $15 billion.