Special Mid-Week Look: Nvidia Earnings and Their Wide-Ranging Impact
Nvidia has a rather lackluster history of post-earnings moves
Two posts in a week, who is this guy?! THAT’s the Nvidia Effect.
Welcome to all the new subscribers. Enjoy our mid-week breakdown of all things NVDA 0.00%↑, featuring earnings history, options activity, storylines to monitor, and much more!
Earnings History
First, the basics. Below is Nvidia’s post-earnings history the last two years (eight reports.)
Five of the last eight reports have finished negative. Hmmm. Notable that for the last three negative post-earnings moves, it was stratospheric expectations that were the culprit. An implied earnings deviation of 12.2% seems really really steep considering the average post-earnings move of 4.7%.
Options Notebook
There’s some interesting options movement going on, but nothing that is really making sounding the alarm bells.
June 200 calls and puts are in the top five open interest positions.
NVDA’s 10-day call/put skew of 2.93 sits in the 98th percentile of its annual range, to the surprise of no one.
On Tuesday though, options volume was in just the 8th percentile of its annual range while stock volume was in the 1st.
A top trade in the short term to watch is a put spread at the weekly 5/22 207.50/212.50-strikes.
Nothing eye-opening. Except, lets look around the sector…
The SMH 0.00%↑ contains roughly 20% of NVDA 0.00%↑. The ETF’s 10-day put/call ratio of 3.71 (!) sits in the 87th percentile of its annual range. The 50-day of 4.37 is in the 96th percentile. Noooticing.
The broader QQQ 0.00%↑ p/c ratios are way more muted. But there are some semiconductor bears circling rubbing their hands together ahead of tomorrow night.
Technicals
NVDA, fresh off a 14.4% monthly gain in April, is working off its overbought condition from the May 13 peak at $236.54.
Below, $200 and $195 look like worse-case scenario floors. Above, breaking through that trendline connecting the November and May peaks seems like the best-case.
Sentiment
This may be surprising to hear, but everyone loves the world’s most valuable company. But you can still learn something from sentiment! KeyBanc and Morgan Stanley hiked their price targets to $300 and $285, respectively, yesterday. There have been six price-target hikes in May alone.
The consensus 12-month price target of $271.62 is a 22.3% premium to its current perch. If NVDA is hit with another post-earnings selloff driven by overbaked expectations, do analysts adjust their targets, which in turn exacerbates the selloff?
Questions I’m Asking
Can a solid report lift Alphabet (GOOGL) into Club $5 trillion?
Which of Oracle (ORCL), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Micron Technology (MU), Intel (INTC), or any other semiconductor stalwart will benefits the most/least?
What is the impact on the data center trade? Got any deals to report, y’all?
Does CEO Jansen Huang talk Trump on the call?
China?
What is the impact on AI?
What is Ed Zitron doing right now?
What happens if we decide to suddenly nuke Iran (or Cuba) tomorrow?
What happens if we sign a peace treaty?!
What Others Are Saying
There remains concrete business at home. Projected 2026 capital spending by AI hyperscalers like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft has risen from $531 billion in December to $725 billion, according to BNP Paribas, underscoring just how dramatically AI investment, which requires semiconductors, is accelerating. That means even if Nvidia cedes some of its roughly 85% market share to established competitors like AMD and Qualcomm, upstarts like the newly public Cerebras and hyperscalers launching their own chips, there’s still plenty of forecasted money to be made. Take the fourth quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, when revenue rose 73% year over year to $68 billion or the $78 billion forecast executives offered for this week’s report. It’s enough to mean that China doing its own thing and competitors finding their feet are unlikely to fluster bullish analysts:
The Daily Upside, nailing the landing
“We’ve now arrived at the era of useful AI, which is the reason why demand is going parabolic, utterly parabolic,” Huang said. “What took months now takes weeks. What took weeks now takes days. And what takes days now takes hours. It’s a big deal in productivity, but a gigantic leap in computation requirements.”
Huang, at Dell Technologies World (insurance salesman stresses need for insurance)
Enjoy the show, folks!
