If I didn’t own Nvidia , I wouldn’t buy it on Monday. The stock will probably go lower from wherever it opens. That said, Nvidia still represents the most cutting-edge tech we have, and that won’t go away. Nor is the considerable bench that CEO Jensen Huang has — something needed when a 63-year-old is running the company. So, why not buy it? Because the affair with an accused Chinese spy that Jensen had and now admits to — after initially denying it to the press — is going to take a big chunk out of this stock simply because no one knows where this investigation is going to go. So, why not sell it? A hedge fund would be wise to sell it, and then buy it back later. But I don’t know how much later, and we are not hedge fund managers. I think Nvidia will report outstanding numbers on Nov. 17. I do not believe that, even after the Democratic wave in the election, the data center story is played out. It is slowed, but it is still alive. The simple fact is that if you buy Nvidia’s product — not Jensen’s, but Nvidia’s — like Elon Musk has, you can make a huge return either by selling the compute or by using the compute. Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) last longer than people think. Compute is worth more than people realize. But Jensen’s story? It is complicated, and complicated means long investigations, and long investigations, no doubt by multiple government entities, spell dead money for shareholders. Nothing will be cleared up by earnings, although I do believe that the numbers will be so good that you could get a rally even with Jensen sidelined by this and yet still with the company. Did Jensen do something inappropriate? Of course. He admitted it. Should he have realized that he is not just a husband and a father but the CEO of arguably the most important company of our time and a steward of the shareholders? No kidding. I am not, however, here to judge him personally for doing something that others have done, for doing something stupid, that I am sure he wishes he hadn’t done. It is way too late for that. The infidelity? That’s between Jensen and his family. It’s the investigations and the news flow that are going to make it a very hard stock to own, or, should I say, an even harder stock to own post-midterms. I, fundamentally, believe that this was a story just about infidelity. I do not think that Jensen gave Megaspeed’s Alice Huang (no relation, just the same name) any proprietary Nvidia secrets. I do not think he compromised national security. I believe that he did not know she was part of what U.S. intelligence officials think was a Chinese plot to find out trade secrets or our government’s policy. I do not think he told her anything about his relationship with the U.S. government that we don’t know or can’t figure out. I don’t think it was a serious relationship. None of what I think matters. No innocent but knuckleheaded narrative is going to come to save him or his shareholders because this one is just too juicy…
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