Full disclosure: I own Nvidia outside of an index fund.

I bought it around $120.50 on January 27, 2025. So yeah, I’m up quite a bit on it. But I didn’t buy much, certainly not in the context of people who buy a lot. So no, I’m not bragging.

Allow me a brief aside. Unlike the constellation of bullsh-tters who spend their days racking up social media followers by posting pictures of exotic cars that aren’t theirs and, in the same vein, Redditors stirring the FOMO pot with doctored brokerage statements purporting to show seven-figure, single-session gains on options positions, I’m not so insecure that I need to lie about my lot in life.

As I’m always keen to remind readers, I’m not wealthy, nor rich. In the national context, I’m merely well-off. My trick’s simple. I juxtapose above-average annual earnings with environs where the typical local income is below (and in some cases well below) the national median, thereby turning “above-average” into “well-above-average.” Also, I have no life overhead (i.e., no spouse and no children), and I’m incorporated as a pass-through entity. It’s not complicated. If any of you are accountants, you probably know somebody who, financially speaking anyway, is me.

I say all of that to underscore the notion that when I say I bought Nvidia 55% ago or, to use the most “famous” example from the last several years, Meta below $100 on October 27, 2022, I’m telling you the truth, and I’m saying it conversationally, in the natural course of market color. Not as the Twitter guy telling you he bought Bitcoin for $250 and now owns an island. What you read in these pages is my real life, for good and bad, better or worse.

The reason it often seems like things are going so well for me (clinical depression aside), is that after 10 years of sobriety, most of the decisions I make are well-considered, and tend to turn out good. Buying Nvidia early last year was one of those well-considered decisions. Scroll back up and look at the timestamp on that purchase: January 27, 2025. Ring a bell? It should. That was “DeepSeek day.” That session, Nvidia shed nearly half a trillion in market value solely on claims, many of which were, and remain to this day, unverifiable, made by a Chinese AI startup.

That’s the kind of “you don’t need to be a genius” trade I often speak about in these pages. And those are the only kinds of trades I make outside of ETFs. Meta in late-October 2022 was a similar trade. Either Mark Zuckerberg was going out of business — the stock was down 76% — or he wasn’t. Plainly he wasn’t. So, I bought Meta. And sold it 500% later, in July of 2024.

If you can string together three or four of those sort of trades in any given year, you can keep your overall returns at, or even slightly above, the long run mean for a balanced portfolio while running a much higher cash allocation than you otherwise would, which is to say your risk-adjusted return should be higher, notwithstanding the uptick in volatility from the single-stock positions.

Ok, so that “introduction” ended up being much longer than I intended, but I imagine readers will find it to be the most interesting part of this otherwise totally run-of-the-mill market update.

Nvidia on Thursday sold off heavily, at least in market-cap terms. When your company’s valued by the market at $4.5 trillion, a 5% selloff’s an epic wealth destruction event.

Through noon on Thursday, Nvidia had erased a quarter trillion in market cap during what was on pace to be the second-worst session for the stock since the turmoil around “Liberation Day.”

This was a case where the price action dictated the narrative entirely. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a sillier batch of headlines — where “silly” means the narrative was entirely detached from the fundamental reality of the news — than the Nvidia-related stories which dominated my inbox on Thursday.

“Nvidia’s damp squib,” declared Reuters. “Nvidia forecast underwhelms,” Bloomberg said. And on and on.

There’s no world in which Nvidia’s results and guide can be aptly described as a “damp squib” or in any way “underwhelming.” That’s ridiculous. The top-line readout and the current-quarter sales guide were phenomenal. Period.

The problem certainly isn’t (can’t be) that Nvidia’s fundamentally worth $250 billion less on Thursday than it was on Wednesday, before it reported results that matched even the unofficial, rosy buy-side consensus (the numbers blew away the sell-side estimates).

Rather, at a high level, the issue is that no one knows how much this technology is worth in the first place, particularly as the AI discussion begins to morph into a sort of binary debate where one outcome’s the human apocalypse and the other outcome is… well, something other than armageddon.

I say this not as an investor who isn’t satisfied with a 50% gain on a relatively small stake in Nvidia, and certainly not as a card-carrying member of Jensen Huang’s fan club (half of what he says seems comically hyperbolic to me, and the other half, by virtue of being tech speak, I can’t understand at all), but rather as someone who finds it absurd when financial media headlines are so beholden to the price action that they become untethered from the reality of the underlying.

That latter bit perhaps gets at the core problem: We really don’t know what that underlying reality is just yet. Until we do, I’m loath to buy more Nvidia. If the results the company reported on Wednesday evening aren’t good enough, then this bar is so high that it’s no longer clearable.