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Comment by Ologn

2 months ago

> Expectations are priced in, and others probably have more information than you anyway.

I have always made money on the stock market. I bought Nvidia in December 2022 and then again in April 2023. Yes the information was out there - anyone reading this board back then could see it. Or who saw Emad Mostaque's tweets that Stable Diffusion was trained on Nvidia, or who knew the semi-public information that OpenAI trained on Nvidia. I bought and it quadrupled in two years when averaging out. The expectations on this board were not priced in the market then.

When FAANG and more b2b tech companies (Salesforce, Oracle) tanked in 2022 I poured money into tech indexes like IYW and IGV. Not as much as into Nvidia, but they were good companies and finally and unusually cheap. They went way up too.

I was making money in the 1990s buying SGI, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Cisco etc. No brainers for me.

Only two losses I recall - Cascade, a router company whose stock dipped and was bought ny US Robotics on the dip (1990s?). Also some ad company which was crushed by competition with Google.

I completely disagree with your premise. I don't even know how to make a neural network in Pytorch, nor can I do matrix math with NumPy. But in December 2022 Nvidia seemed worth the risk, and by April of last year a lot of that risk evaporated with a huge potential upside. I knew the stock was cheap and all the PhDs on Wall Street did not. Also, they are stuck in a bureaucracy - I used to work in IT for a major investment bank in Manhattan. Watch the Big Short on the pressure the people who were right got from their management and investors. I don't have that pressure, it is my money.

We, the people here, do get insights which are not priced in. It's not that there is no risk, but the coin flip sometimes goes 51% in our favor. Sometimes even 52% (or 53%...or 60%). This is how Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch etc. made money.

Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than me about how transformers work.

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Ologn

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programmertote  2 months ago

> Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than me about how transformers work.

Are you saying that AMD will not be a serious competitor to NVIDIA?

  • Ologn  2 months ago

    I am saying several different things. For your question, the farther out in the future, the more uncertain it is. The stock analyses from the middle of last year which talked about the threat of AMD in a more immediate tone were obviously wrong. Some of the analysis now that talks about the short-term threat of AMD does not jibe with what programmers here working with AMD have said in threads this week. Or what George Hotz or others are saying about buggy AMD chips.

    One point is we here know certain things here that stock analysts looking at the last quarterly report do not. The short-term threat of AMD was certainly overstated by Wall Street last year, and in my opinion still is.

    If we stop talking in terms of months and start talking in terms of years, it is harder to tell. Maybe AMD will get its act together and give Nvidia a run for its money. Maybe not. For 2025, I don't think AMD will have much effect on Nvidia though.

Hercuros  2 months ago

For every story like this, there’s another story where everything moves in the opposite direction.