Shares of the S&P 500’s hottest stocks rose tenfold on Friday.
After the market close, Nvidia’s 10-for-1 stock split, announced last May call for results, came into force. But this will not change much in the company’s situation. A valuation of 3,000 billion dollars or its underlying fundamentals, which until now have investors licking their lips.
“You and I know that a stock split is only cosmetic, at least for existing shareholders,” says Paul Meeks, a veteran technology investor and business school professor at The Citadel military college. “With its investor relations, Nvidia is well aware that it needs to continue to throw some bones” to investors.
Few other companies have embodied the new corporate pecking order ushered in by the proliferation of AI quite like Nvidia. From the company action has increased 3,174% over the past five years and 218% over the past year alone. During its epic journey, Nvidia market capitalization has soared beyond the tastes of Amazon And Alphabet. Before the 10-for-1 split, the stock was at a stratospheric price of $1,209.
This price was probably too high for most investors, and certainly for the individual investors the split was intended to attract, according to Humayun Sheikh, CEO of startup Fetch.ai, which provides development tools specifically for AI. “The stock split strengthens Nvidia’s appeal by making shares more affordable, thereby broadening its investor base,” he said.
Sheikh also sees this development, at least in part, as a function of investor perception, saying it was likely “influenced by optics” and could accelerate market capitalization gains.
Nvidia’s position as a company that has cornered the market providing AI developers with all the chips and computing power they need does not change due to the stock split. In the first quarter, Nvidia sales increased by 262% per year to $26 billion, exceeding Wall Street’s already high expectations.
The rise in Nvidia’s stock also serves as a clue to what the AI boom might still have in store.
“Nvidia’s price change over the last year tells us something about the market, which is that AI may be the new general-purpose technology, like the Internet or electricity, that will have implications massive impacts on productivity across the economy, and so AI companies are going to benefit greatly,” said Vasant Dhar, a professor at NYU’s business school.
What Could Go Wrong With Nvidia’s Stock Split?
Nonetheless, investors are considering a few scenarios in which things could go wrong for them after the stock split, even because they admit the chances are slim.
For Meeks, the only thing that could stop Nvidia’s development walk to the top This is a slowdown in the overall economy, which he considers unlikely as he expects the United States to avoid a recession and the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates at early 2025. In fact, he’s already thinking about how Nvidia will perform if the economy improves.
“It would be difficult for these stocks to lose their gains if all of a sudden we…
