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> As a retail investor, it's good to remind myself that if I actually had the skills to invest professionally, someone would probably be paying me to do it for

> As a retail investor, it's good to remind myself that if I actually had the skills to invest professionally, someone would probably be paying me to do it for them. Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages, combined with it's increasing relevance in compute (gaming, followed by blockchain, followed by ML, followed by GPT) would have made this an NVDA an easy pick for anyone (of the increasing number of people) that worked in parallel computing from 2006-2023. Sometimes you can see a company is positioning itself for a great long term position before the entire wallstreet herd takes notice. That's when you add a single stock as part of your diverse portfolio. I keep up to 5% of my stock portfolio as these single stock picks, judged entirely on the product the company sells.

Terr_ 2y ago
> Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. [...] diverse portfolio It's worth emphasizing that investing in the same sector that you are employed-in is actually a kind of anti-diversification, and it won't usually show up using "rate my portfolio" tools. The archetypal example that comes to mind--unusually extreme but illustrative--would be all those Enron employees who invested their 401(k) funds straight into their own employer. Consider these three scenarios: 1. If your investments plummet but you keep getting wages from you job, you can try riding it out until they recover. 2. If you become long-term unemployed but your investments stay normal, you can sell a little to cover the gap. 3. But if you can't work and your investments plummet, you may be forced to "sell low" quite a lot to cover immediate expenses, and the long-term outcome is much worse.
- gamepsys 2y ago
  1. It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. Investing in a vendor (in Nvidia's case) or another adjacent company is lower risk. You cannot avoid risk in investing, it's a natural part of the situation. 2. You can avoid the sell low situation by having 3-6 months of expenses saved in an emergency savings account. With all the layoffs in the last few years everyone should have gotten the message to do this. Even in a large downturn six months of expenses in a savings account is enough for you to re-skill and find new employment.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s rational. The people who held onto their RSUs from being hired at Zoom during the height of the pandemic might not be so happy they chose to double down on their employment risk with investor risk.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      > Just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s rational. Also, an agenda that is rational for one party may be irrational for the other. Many employers would be overjoyed if their workers agreed to be paid 100% in deferred-vesting RSUs and converted all their private savings into pure company stock. It would both drive the price up and shackle workers to certain company interests. But if an employee sought the same outcome, we'd question their sanity.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. For certain companies, but misleading: Most of that is stock which their employer structured into compensation, and sometimes they only kinda-maybe-potentially own it because it's an unvested RSU or un-exercised stock-option etc. That's not the same as taking your paycheck and then choosing to spend part of it on shares from the open market.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. It's actually not. The tech industry is much bigger than startups and the like, and outside of that environment it's not normal to own a lot of stock in your employer.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I would have said it's larger tech companies where it's fairly common to own (some) stock that's actually worth something. (So maybe not a lot in the scheme of things.)
  - 2y ago
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  > investing in the same sector that you are employed-in is actually a kind of anti-diversification You can reduce your microeconomic risks by making investments in and around your sector of occupation. Especially when betting against yourself. For example, someone who works in the electric vehicle space could reduce their risk by making personal investments in ICE companies, just in case EV adoption is slower than expected. A person who works in a payment processor could invest in visa/mastercard, to protect from the risk of fee rises. A privacy tech investor could put money into adtech, so they can make money whoever wins.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    > For example, someone who works in the electric vehicle space could reduce their risk by making personal investments in ICE companies, just in case EV adoption is slower than expected. This works well if the EV industry slows and ICEs are poised to dominate the future. This works very very badly if the vehicle industry as a whole slows and the entire sector tanks.
    - mattmaroon 2y ago
      It may work in the actual case: EVs are the future, but the longer term future, and the market irrationally decides a company that makes 1% of the cars is worth 50% of the industry because they greatly overestimate how fast the transition will occur and the legacy auto makers (whose stocks have underperformed due to the same bad prediction) have plenty of time to use their substantial advantages to compete.
    - spacebanana7 2y ago
      Yeah it only works well for narrowly defined microeconomic risks. However, in sectors like vehicles there's a relatively low risk people will stop car purchases altogether but a very very high risk they'll buy from another manufacturer instead of yours.
  - orojackson 2y ago
    > You can reduce your microeconomic risks by making investments in and around your sector of occupation. Especially when betting against yourself. Or I can just put my money in something like VTI (total US stock market) or VT (total world stock). Effectively does the same thing with almost zero effort. One thing I don't really like about the comments here is how insistent people are in doing something specific as opposed to picking the simplest thing and then sticking to it. Most of the power of investing comes from time. Admittedly, though, I have been putting new money into a leveraged ETF, RSSB, which is a 2x leveraged 50/50 global stocks and bonds fund (so 100/100). Existing money is still in VT. The only reason why I'm pursuing this is because of Cliff Asness's great article [1], which argues against going 100% stocks (which I used to do) and instead prefers using something like leverage on a 60/40 portfolio. [1] https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Why-Not-100-Equities https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Why-Not-100-Equiti...
bell-cot 2y ago
> Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. True...but especially when it comes to investing - the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
- njarboe 2y ago
  If you are shorting stocks or buying on margin, this may be true, but if you buy and hold, no additional funds are needed (ie. you will stay solvent).
wslh 2y ago
1000% but when it is the right time (per fundamental analysis). For example around the subprime crisis companies such as Microsoft had a low PE ratio and the average person thought that Microsoft was a loser vs. Apple and Google. Microsoft has a resilience track record that would be the envy of most companies and .NET was a real thing. I also remember other companies such as Globant that has a lower PE price vs. similar companies after their IPO. It is incredible that some investors try to build very complex models instead of waiting for the right opportunity. Not against speculation but you should know when you are doing it or fundamental investing.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Microsoft has actually been a nice investment if you bought in the latter 2010s. I don't remember why I did. Probably I liked what Nadella was doing.
  - wslh 2y ago
    I bought it within the subprime crisis because of the simple PE ratio and deep technical knowledge of Microsoft [1]. [1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2020/01/12/reflecting-on-16-years-of-work-on-adversarial-interoperability/ https://www.nektra.com/main/2020/01/12/reflecting-on-16-year...
- gamepsys 2y ago
  Rule of thumb, the more people are talking about a stock the more weary you should be that your insight is ahead of the curve.
  - wslh 2y ago
    Completely, is linked to the Warren Buffet insight watching people playing at the Casinos [1]. [1] https://money.com/warren-buffett-stock-market-casino/ https://money.com/warren-buffett-stock-market-casino/
cinntaile 2y ago
This sounds a lot like hindsight bias. Nvidia is a great company but they lucked out on two unpredictable hypes, crypto and AI, that happened in close sequence to each other.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  We tend to underestimate the fortune component of success when we succeed. And other aspects, like ruthlessness. Also, having a self satisfaction in the wise (but cautious, or even silent) past forecasting of success for those that coincidentally succeeded eventually (forgetting the others we were wrong about). We seen good and promising products targetting growing markets fail while competing half crap craps sell wild with the broad public and win, go large.
- mianos 2y ago
  Considering just before the AI hype came along they were in trouble according to Jensen on the Acquired podcast.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Without predicting the future of the AI cycle, the crypto bubble basically burst and the high end gamer market is a pimple on a pimple. And, certainly, the fact that the AI hype came along when it did was hardly ordained--though the availability of GPU hardware had something to do with it. Nvidia's recent success was in no way pre-ordained to anyone who had two brain cells to rub against each other as various people here seem to think.
graemep 2y ago
> Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages Analysts do follow what is happening in an industry and talk to people in an industry. SOme have worked in the industry they follow. If you want to get ahead of them you need to focus on something ahead of them - something small or specialist at the time.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I might argue that financial analysts are too focused on their models and this quarter's numbers but most of the better ones are actually pretty savvy about the trends and other happenings in the industry that they follow. They're as susceptible to the hype du jour as most people are but they're not actually stupid for the most part.
  - graemep 2y ago
    Yes, but remember there are multiple layers to that. I have worked as a buy side analyst in a small team (in my former career) and did much less detailed modelling. There is an incentive structure that pushes fund managers to look at their rankings this year: there is no point in aiming at outperforming over a decade if you got fired two years in for underperforming. It has happened to people who have not bought into booms. I actually think avoiding the "hype de jour" is one place where small investors have a chance to do well. Avoid the overhyped, pick up the neglected and you can outperform.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      No argument. Incentives matter. There's one company I looked at for a modest investment and I was like "This is the only company in the world that can do something that is obviously needed in semiconductors but has long cycles" and it stagnated for a year or two. (And then went up considerably.) As a financial analyst I might very well have logically held off for a bit.
bregma 2y ago
> Sometimes you can see a company is positioning itself for a great long term position before the entire wallstreet herd takes notice. Well, the investment landscape is littered with the rotting husks of companies with great products. Wonderful, amazing products. They had incompetent management. Or the market for their amazing product never took off. Or there was a general downturn in the economy and they couldn't get cash when they needed it. If the company has demonstrated itself a good investment, you can rest assured the wolves of Wall Street have already picked the carcass clean before you as a retail investor even get a whiff. They run analyses on factors you don't even know about to make their picks, and they do it in large number like you're never likely to see. Even if you make the right picks, it's often the wrong pick. Consider if you had invested in Oxycodone a few years ago. It was a great product, brought simple, accessible, effective pain relief to the masses. Prescriptions were flying off the shelves like no other drug before it that wasn't a statin. I'm sure a handful of retail investors are smugly crying "inb4" but most of them are left holding the bag on that one. Hindsight investing is mostly a bitter strategy.
hoseja 2y ago
That comparative is doing a lot of work.
vitus 2y ago
So you've been invested in NVDA for 15 years? Because that's how long AMD's been trying unsuccessfully to crack CUDA's secret (OpenCL was initially released in 2009 when it was already clear that nobody wanted to use AMD cards for HPC). Or how about 5-10 years, when it was clear that everyone was using Nvidia for crypto-related purposes? Heck, even start-of-pandemic when high-end graphics cards were nigh impossible to buy without a 3x markup? (A cool 1500% ROI to date) This is the sort of thing that's obvious to everyone in hindsight, but it's not always clear in the moment, nor is it clear when the stock has peaked (how many people sold in Nov 2021 as the GPU shortage was starting to ease?). If you bought NVDA on Jan 1 2006 and held it for 10 years, then you'd have about +100% ROI, or about 7% per year. Not terrible (S&P 500 was closer to +50% ROI over that timeframe), but not amazing (compare this to GOOGL which had a +250% ROI, or AMZN which grew 10x over the same timeframe). Amazon was also an obvious winner in that timeframe due to AWS, right? What about Google / Alphabet? What was unique about its circumstances that warranted it growing twice as fast as Nvidia in that timeframe? Google Plus? Android (it didn't grow 10x like Apple did)? YouTube? It wasn't clear then that NVDA would have been the winner that it is today, and it's similarly not clear today if NVDA has another 10x gains ahead of it, or if it's already peaked. Or, for that matter, what the next big tech winner will be. (I bet it already exists. It might even already be publicly traded.) edit: also, if I had perfect predictive knowledge of the financial markets, I'd have put $1000 on BTC back in 2011 when it was about $2 a pop, and sold at any of the recent peaks for $3+ million. There is literally no technical justification for those returns other than market speculation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I agree with the first paragraph, but I think your math is wrong. If you invested in Nvidia in 2006 it'd be up 46% a year every year on that investment.
  - computerliker69 2y ago
    They mentioned the timeframe as 2006-2016. I think they were purposely omitting the recent gains to highlight their point about the unexpectedness of NVDA's stock jump.
UncleMeat 2y ago
An extended family member is a software engineer who has worked in wireless networking for decades and decades, including being personally involved in the development of key parts of 5g. In the 00s there was some company that had great tech. Surely useful for the future. He put a shitload of money in there. On each paycheck he put in more and more. But although the company had great tech, it didn't end up being the market winner for whatever reason. As the stock dropped and dropped he bought more and more. After all, it was the best tech. He lost a fortune. It is probably easy to look back and say "well, I knew that CUDA was easier to use than OpenMPI ages ago, it was obvious that nvidia would blow up."
- mrb 2y ago
  You extended family member's story is a classic error of "putting all your eggs in one basket."
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    Of course. But it is still relevant when discussing why one should not discount the knowledge you have by being deep in an industry. Yes, he would have lost less money if he hadn't gone so deep here. But he still would have lost his investment had he put 5% in or whatever. The point is that even deep knowledge about an industry isn't going to ensure winning picks.
- gamepsys 2y ago
  I clearly said "up to 5%". If I lose 5% of my stock portfolio on a single stock in a year, but the rest of my portfolio goes up the expected annual return of 8%, I still made money that year.
humansareok1 2y ago
>The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages, combined with it's increasing relevance in compute (gaming, followed by blockchain, followed by ML, followed by GPT) would have made this an NVDA an easy pick for anyone (of the increasing number of people) that worked in parallel computing from 2006-2023. Hindsight is 20/20. I highly doubt people in parallel computing, unless they already worked at Nvidia, have done better than anyone else with their portfolios. Other than the standard delta you'd assume since those people are probably savvier investors in general.

Terr_ 2y ago

> Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. [...] diverse portfolio It's worth emphasizing that investing in the same sector that you are employed-in is actually a kind of anti-diversification, and it won't usually show up using "rate my portfolio" tools. The archetypal example that comes to mind--unusually extreme but illustrative--would be all those Enron employees who invested their 401(k) funds straight into their own employer. Consider these three scenarios: 1. If your investments plummet but you keep getting wages from you job, you can try riding it out until they recover. 2. If you become long-term unemployed but your investments stay normal, you can sell a little to cover the gap. 3. But if you can't work and your investments plummet, you may be forced to "sell low" quite a lot to cover immediate expenses, and the long-term outcome is much worse.

gamepsys 2y ago
1. It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. Investing in a vendor (in Nvidia's case) or another adjacent company is lower risk. You cannot avoid risk in investing, it's a natural part of the situation. 2. You can avoid the sell low situation by having 3-6 months of expenses saved in an emergency savings account. With all the layoffs in the last few years everyone should have gotten the message to do this. Even in a large downturn six months of expenses in a savings account is enough for you to re-skill and find new employment.
- pembrook 2y ago
  Just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s rational. The people who held onto their RSUs from being hired at Zoom during the height of the pandemic might not be so happy they chose to double down on their employment risk with investor risk.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > Just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s rational. Also, an agenda that is rational for one party may be irrational for the other. Many employers would be overjoyed if their workers agreed to be paid 100% in deferred-vesting RSUs and converted all their private savings into pure company stock. It would both drive the price up and shackle workers to certain company interests. But if an employee sought the same outcome, we'd question their sanity.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. For certain companies, but misleading: Most of that is stock which their employer structured into compensation, and sometimes they only kinda-maybe-potentially own it because it's an unvested RSU or un-exercised stock-option etc. That's not the same as taking your paycheck and then choosing to spend part of it on shares from the open market.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. It's actually not. The tech industry is much bigger than startups and the like, and outside of that environment it's not normal to own a lot of stock in your employer.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I would have said it's larger tech companies where it's fairly common to own (some) stock that's actually worth something. (So maybe not a lot in the scheme of things.)
- 2y ago
spacebanana7 2y ago
> investing in the same sector that you are employed-in is actually a kind of anti-diversification You can reduce your microeconomic risks by making investments in and around your sector of occupation. Especially when betting against yourself. For example, someone who works in the electric vehicle space could reduce their risk by making personal investments in ICE companies, just in case EV adoption is slower than expected. A person who works in a payment processor could invest in visa/mastercard, to protect from the risk of fee rises. A privacy tech investor could put money into adtech, so they can make money whoever wins.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  > For example, someone who works in the electric vehicle space could reduce their risk by making personal investments in ICE companies, just in case EV adoption is slower than expected. This works well if the EV industry slows and ICEs are poised to dominate the future. This works very very badly if the vehicle industry as a whole slows and the entire sector tanks.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    It may work in the actual case: EVs are the future, but the longer term future, and the market irrationally decides a company that makes 1% of the cars is worth 50% of the industry because they greatly overestimate how fast the transition will occur and the legacy auto makers (whose stocks have underperformed due to the same bad prediction) have plenty of time to use their substantial advantages to compete.
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    Yeah it only works well for narrowly defined microeconomic risks. However, in sectors like vehicles there's a relatively low risk people will stop car purchases altogether but a very very high risk they'll buy from another manufacturer instead of yours.
- orojackson 2y ago
  > You can reduce your microeconomic risks by making investments in and around your sector of occupation. Especially when betting against yourself. Or I can just put my money in something like VTI (total US stock market) or VT (total world stock). Effectively does the same thing with almost zero effort. One thing I don't really like about the comments here is how insistent people are in doing something specific as opposed to picking the simplest thing and then sticking to it. Most of the power of investing comes from time. Admittedly, though, I have been putting new money into a leveraged ETF, RSSB, which is a 2x leveraged 50/50 global stocks and bonds fund (so 100/100). Existing money is still in VT. The only reason why I'm pursuing this is because of Cliff Asness's great article [1], which argues against going 100% stocks (which I used to do) and instead prefers using something like leverage on a 60/40 portfolio. [1] https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Why-Not-100-Equities https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Why-Not-100-Equiti...

bell-cot 2y ago

> Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. True...but especially when it comes to investing - the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

njarboe 2y ago
If you are shorting stocks or buying on margin, this may be true, but if you buy and hold, no additional funds are needed (ie. you will stay solvent).

wslh 2y ago

1000% but when it is the right time (per fundamental analysis). For example around the subprime crisis companies such as Microsoft had a low PE ratio and the average person thought that Microsoft was a loser vs. Apple and Google. Microsoft has a resilience track record that would be the envy of most companies and .NET was a real thing. I also remember other companies such as Globant that has a lower PE price vs. similar companies after their IPO. It is incredible that some investors try to build very complex models instead of waiting for the right opportunity. Not against speculation but you should know when you are doing it or fundamental investing.

ghaff 2y ago
Microsoft has actually been a nice investment if you bought in the latter 2010s. I don't remember why I did. Probably I liked what Nadella was doing.
- wslh 2y ago
  I bought it within the subprime crisis because of the simple PE ratio and deep technical knowledge of Microsoft [1]. [1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2020/01/12/reflecting-on-16-years-of-work-on-adversarial-interoperability/ https://www.nektra.com/main/2020/01/12/reflecting-on-16-year...
gamepsys 2y ago
Rule of thumb, the more people are talking about a stock the more weary you should be that your insight is ahead of the curve.
- wslh 2y ago
  Completely, is linked to the Warren Buffet insight watching people playing at the Casinos [1]. [1] https://money.com/warren-buffett-stock-market-casino/ https://money.com/warren-buffett-stock-market-casino/

cinntaile 2y ago

This sounds a lot like hindsight bias. Nvidia is a great company but they lucked out on two unpredictable hypes, crypto and AI, that happened in close sequence to each other.

mihaaly 2y ago
We tend to underestimate the fortune component of success when we succeed. And other aspects, like ruthlessness. Also, having a self satisfaction in the wise (but cautious, or even silent) past forecasting of success for those that coincidentally succeeded eventually (forgetting the others we were wrong about). We seen good and promising products targetting growing markets fail while competing half crap craps sell wild with the broad public and win, go large.
mianos 2y ago
Considering just before the AI hype came along they were in trouble according to Jensen on the Acquired podcast.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Without predicting the future of the AI cycle, the crypto bubble basically burst and the high end gamer market is a pimple on a pimple. And, certainly, the fact that the AI hype came along when it did was hardly ordained--though the availability of GPU hardware had something to do with it. Nvidia's recent success was in no way pre-ordained to anyone who had two brain cells to rub against each other as various people here seem to think.

graemep 2y ago

> Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages Analysts do follow what is happening in an industry and talk to people in an industry. SOme have worked in the industry they follow. If you want to get ahead of them you need to focus on something ahead of them - something small or specialist at the time.

ghaff 2y ago
I might argue that financial analysts are too focused on their models and this quarter's numbers but most of the better ones are actually pretty savvy about the trends and other happenings in the industry that they follow. They're as susceptible to the hype du jour as most people are but they're not actually stupid for the most part.
- graemep 2y ago
  Yes, but remember there are multiple layers to that. I have worked as a buy side analyst in a small team (in my former career) and did much less detailed modelling. There is an incentive structure that pushes fund managers to look at their rankings this year: there is no point in aiming at outperforming over a decade if you got fired two years in for underperforming. It has happened to people who have not bought into booms. I actually think avoiding the "hype de jour" is one place where small investors have a chance to do well. Avoid the overhyped, pick up the neglected and you can outperform.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    No argument. Incentives matter. There's one company I looked at for a modest investment and I was like "This is the only company in the world that can do something that is obviously needed in semiconductors but has long cycles" and it stagnated for a year or two. (And then went up considerably.) As a financial analyst I might very well have logically held off for a bit.

bregma 2y ago

> Sometimes you can see a company is positioning itself for a great long term position before the entire wallstreet herd takes notice. Well, the investment landscape is littered with the rotting husks of companies with great products. Wonderful, amazing products. They had incompetent management. Or the market for their amazing product never took off. Or there was a general downturn in the economy and they couldn't get cash when they needed it. If the company has demonstrated itself a good investment, you can rest assured the wolves of Wall Street have already picked the carcass clean before you as a retail investor even get a whiff. They run analyses on factors you don't even know about to make their picks, and they do it in large number like you're never likely to see. Even if you make the right picks, it's often the wrong pick. Consider if you had invested in Oxycodone a few years ago. It was a great product, brought simple, accessible, effective pain relief to the masses. Prescriptions were flying off the shelves like no other drug before it that wasn't a statin. I'm sure a handful of retail investors are smugly crying "inb4" but most of them are left holding the bag on that one. Hindsight investing is mostly a bitter strategy.

hoseja 2y ago

That comparative is doing a lot of work.

vitus 2y ago

So you've been invested in NVDA for 15 years? Because that's how long AMD's been trying unsuccessfully to crack CUDA's secret (OpenCL was initially released in 2009 when it was already clear that nobody wanted to use AMD cards for HPC). Or how about 5-10 years, when it was clear that everyone was using Nvidia for crypto-related purposes? Heck, even start-of-pandemic when high-end graphics cards were nigh impossible to buy without a 3x markup? (A cool 1500% ROI to date) This is the sort of thing that's obvious to everyone in hindsight, but it's not always clear in the moment, nor is it clear when the stock has peaked (how many people sold in Nov 2021 as the GPU shortage was starting to ease?). If you bought NVDA on Jan 1 2006 and held it for 10 years, then you'd have about +100% ROI, or about 7% per year. Not terrible (S&P 500 was closer to +50% ROI over that timeframe), but not amazing (compare this to GOOGL which had a +250% ROI, or AMZN which grew 10x over the same timeframe). Amazon was also an obvious winner in that timeframe due to AWS, right? What about Google / Alphabet? What was unique about its circumstances that warranted it growing twice as fast as Nvidia in that timeframe? Google Plus? Android (it didn't grow 10x like Apple did)? YouTube? It wasn't clear then that NVDA would have been the winner that it is today, and it's similarly not clear today if NVDA has another 10x gains ahead of it, or if it's already peaked. Or, for that matter, what the next big tech winner will be. (I bet it already exists. It might even already be publicly traded.) edit: also, if I had perfect predictive knowledge of the financial markets, I'd have put $1000 on BTC back in 2011 when it was about $2 a pop, and sold at any of the recent peaks for $3+ million. There is literally no technical justification for those returns other than market speculation.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zug_zug 2y ago
I agree with the first paragraph, but I think your math is wrong. If you invested in Nvidia in 2006 it'd be up 46% a year every year on that investment.
- computerliker69 2y ago
  They mentioned the timeframe as 2006-2016. I think they were purposely omitting the recent gains to highlight their point about the unexpectedness of NVDA's stock jump.

UncleMeat 2y ago

An extended family member is a software engineer who has worked in wireless networking for decades and decades, including being personally involved in the development of key parts of 5g. In the 00s there was some company that had great tech. Surely useful for the future. He put a shitload of money in there. On each paycheck he put in more and more. But although the company had great tech, it didn't end up being the market winner for whatever reason. As the stock dropped and dropped he bought more and more. After all, it was the best tech. He lost a fortune. It is probably easy to look back and say "well, I knew that CUDA was easier to use than OpenMPI ages ago, it was obvious that nvidia would blow up."

mrb 2y ago
You extended family member's story is a classic error of "putting all your eggs in one basket."
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  Of course. But it is still relevant when discussing why one should not discount the knowledge you have by being deep in an industry. Yes, he would have lost less money if he hadn't gone so deep here. But he still would have lost his investment had he put 5% in or whatever. The point is that even deep knowledge about an industry isn't going to ensure winning picks.
gamepsys 2y ago
I clearly said "up to 5%". If I lose 5% of my stock portfolio on a single stock in a year, but the rest of my portfolio goes up the expected annual return of 8%, I still made money that year.

humansareok1 2y ago

>The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages, combined with it's increasing relevance in compute (gaming, followed by blockchain, followed by ML, followed by GPT) would have made this an NVDA an easy pick for anyone (of the increasing number of people) that worked in parallel computing from 2006-2023. Hindsight is 20/20. I highly doubt people in parallel computing, unless they already worked at Nvidia, have done better than anyone else with their portfolios. Other than the standard delta you'd assume since those people are probably savvier investors in general.