Nvidia traded $50 billion yesterday; that’s more than 15x what the UK’s entire FTSE 100 did in London
This is not a story about Nvidia.
Nvidia did just enough in its Q2 results this week to keep the AI train rolling. Some investors saw the slight data center miss as a concern; others — including most Wall Street analysts — were satisfied by the continued demand for Blackwell chips. The net result of those opposing arguments was that more than $50 billion changed hands in Nvidia yesterday, and the stock closed within 1% of where it was the day before.
$50 billion is a lot of money. It’s the most Nvidia has traded since May, and it was the most of any stock in the US yesterday. Such is the insatiable appetite for exposure to AI and the depth of the US capital markets that one stock can turnover $7.7 billion an hour, or more than $2 million per second, for an entire trading session.
Still waters run shallow
For British policymakers, it’s a timely reminder of just how sluggish the UK equity markets scene is: Nvidia turned over 15.6x what the entire flagship index of the UK’s stock market traded in London. Indeed, all 100 names in the FTSE 100 index traded the equivalent of only a paltry $3.2 billion on-exchange in London yesterday, per data from Bloomberg.
The hottest stock on London’s tape was British American Tobacco, which traded about $157 million, a little over two minutes’ worth of typical NVDA action.
OK, you might be saying, but Nvidia is Nvidia! It’s the AI golden goose. Perhaps more startling, then, is the fact that Nvidia was one of 16 US stocks to trade more than the entire FTSE 100. The final name on that list is MongoDB, which had a good day, rising 7%. But if a random database company — which most people probably haven’t heard of — is trading more than your entire flagship stock market index, you might have a problem.
