When Jensen Huang speaks, Nvidia usually falls
Ahead of Nvidia’s GTC keynote address this afternoon, I’ll make a confession: I find often find myself a bit entranced when CEO Jensen Huang speaks. It’s something about his oration and imagination — and the ability to back that up with the products that enable ever-increasing sales and profits.
However, lately, the market has been anything but impressed. Through 2025 and 2026, most of Nvidia’s major events (earning reports, CES, or GTC) were met with selling pressure.
That’s a track record the CEO will be looking to improve upon during today’s keynote address, slated to begin at 2 p.m. ET. And he’s being spotted to an early lead, with shares up a little less than 2% as of 10:42 a.m. ET.
The GTC, or GPU Technology Conference, is Nvidia’s twice-a-year event to discuss its outlook and product roadmap.
Note: On all of Nvidia’s down days in the above chart, shares also underperformed the S&P 500 on the session.
High-profile events have not, by and large, been positive catalysts for the stock. This probably doesn’t have much to do with anything the leader of the world’s most valuable publicly traded company actually says, and is more a function of how high expectations get any time you can circle an Nvidia date on the calendar.
The two recent exceptions were:
His address in DC in late October; the stock hit a fresh peak when Huang talked up more than $500 billion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips through 2026. The stock went on to set its all-time intraday and closing highs the following session.
Q1 2026 earnings, where the stock booked a solid gain after better-than-expected results.
Update: A previous version of this post/chart misstated the reaction associated with Nvidia’s Q1 2026 earnings.
