Nvidia Corp. shareholder Bobby Martin has watched roughly $90,000 of his stock market wealth vanish after scandalous revelations broke last weekend about former Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang. Having bought about $100,000 of Nvidia shares in 2023 at $49, he estimates he is still up roughly 70%, and he's betting the stock will recover.
Martin, who's retired and splits his time between Seattle and Spain, said he originally bought Nvidia for its dominance in graphics processors and artificial-intelligence computing chips, not out of faith in Huang.
“It's crazy,” Martin said. “Trillions of dollars should not hinge upon some guy's sex life.”
Until this week, Nvidia's retail investors were some of the luckiest people in the markets, enjoying nearly 300% gains over the last three years. That has come to a halt with the disclosure that Huang had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy and two others, leading to his ouster from the company.
News about the affair over the weekend sent shares tumbling, cutting the chipmaker's market capitalization by about $2 trillion in the span of a week. The stock is down roughly 30% from its record high in October and now trading at its lowest level since July 2025.
Still, many of the retail investors who've helped turn the chipmaker into a giant say they're holding on. Their resolve shows how the downfall of one of the AI boom's most revered figures is doing little to shake investor faith, at least for now.
Huang spent years at the helm of Nvidia, turning the company into one of the market's hottest stocks. His downfall spawned a flood of online commentary, memes and AI-generated videos as investors try to make sense of what the turmoil means for one of the world's biggest companies and even more whether they should buy the dip, as many of them did. Retail interest in Nvidia climbed this week, with individual investors putting a net $1.9 billion into the stock over the past five days, according to Vanda Research, which tracks retail flows.
Nvidia was the most discussed stock on Reddit as of 11:56 a.m. New York time, mentioned more than 5,000 times across subreddits like r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks and r/investing, according to social monitoring firm Altindex. That's more than five times as much as the second most mentioned company Microsoft Corp. The sentiment of the posts discussing Nvidia was neutral, according to Altindex.
“Well boys and girls, we are officially cooked for the short term,” one user wrote on the NvidiaStock Reddit board. “Apple carried on without Jobs,” another replied. “It's a bloodbath. IREN, NBIS, NVDA, AMD, SPCX and just all of them are down. BLOODY FRIDAY!” another poster commented.
A number of analysts have downgraded Nvidia. About 80% of analysts that rate the stock recommended buying as of Friday, down from 96% in mid-October. Truist Securities changed its recommendation to hold from buy, citing concerns over company culture and potential GPU access in China as potential challenges to the companies' future revenue, analysts led by William Stein wrote in a note Thursday.
“Unfortunately, Huang's departure and his association with a woman suspected of being an intelligence asset for China introduce new risks that significantly reduce our ability to reasonably forecast earnings and justify multiples,” the analysts wrote. Nvidia is scheduled to report earnings on Nov. 17.
For Matt Smith, founding adviser of West Highland Advisors in Denver, the situation is a reminder that holding single stocks isn't for the weak of heart. Smith has a client with almost one-third of his portfolio invested in Nvidia, and despite Smith's recommendation of selling a portion of it, he said the client is still holding on as the week's contraction pales in comparison to his gains since buying in 2022.
When clients want to hold single-stock positions, Smith says he recommends using a retirement account, such as a 401(k) or IRA, which allow them to make trades without triggering taxable capital gains.
“Just be careful when you're taking a single stock swing,” Smith said. “I would highly recommend you use a very small portion of your portfolio to take those swings. Because as people like to talk about, there are winners and those make the headlines. But the losers are less talked about, but equally as common.”
Investors don't have to hold Nvidia as a single stock to feel the impact of its moves. The company's shares still account for about 6% of the S&P 500 Index and make up 6.6% of the Nasdaq 100 Index. Despite the turmoil at Nvidia, both indexes are up more than 1% this week.
“Allocating across company sizes and regions can help soften the drop from a single stock like Nvidia,” said Ankur Patel, chief investment officer at wealth manager Ellevest. "Most of the market outside of tech has done well" recently.
Ian Pinholster, a 33-year-old presales engineer from Savannah, Georgia, has been buying Nvidia throughout the week, hoping to catch the stock near its bottom. He now owns 80 shares. When his paycheck hit on Friday, he started pouring $1,200 more into the company.
Ahead of the company's expected earnings release on Tuesday, he sees the selloff as a buying opportunity. “They're once again going to annihilate profit, and it's going to jump right back up,” he said. “They effectively have a monopoly on the market for processing, and processing power isn't going anywhere. If anything, it's going to increase.”
Pinholster caught the investing bug during the pandemic, as a new generation of retail traders began piling into the equity market. He bought his first five Nvidia shares in July 2020 with his Robinhood account. As the years went on, he gradually kept pouring more money into Nvidia. Along with two stock splits that multiplied his holdings, his stake grew to 100 shares. He now estimates his average share purchase price to be around $28.
Volatile days like these remind him of a time he once pulled out — and almost immediately regretted it. Hoping to protect his 600% estimated return, Pinholster placed a trailing stop-loss order to automatically sell his Nvidia shares if the stock ever fell 10%. This spring, while on vacation in South Carolina with his family, he got an alert that all of his shares had been sold. He remembers thinking: “Ah, I wish that wouldn't have hit.”
By early June, he started hopping back in. This time, he's planning to let it ride.
“Folks build companies to outlast them. When Steve Jobs passed away, Tim Cook stepped in, and Apple kept being Apple,” Pinholster said. “Nothing is wrong at Nvidia. It's external affairs getting in the way.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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