motley fool nvidia — and the gpu my ex had

motley fool nvidia, as a phrase, is a stock pick wearing a memory. somewhere there is a chip in a card in a machine in someone’s apartment, and a website explaining, with great patience and slightly less interest, what the chip is doing this quarter. i did not buy any of the stock. cold pizza is breakfast. that is the kind of conviction my portfolio has.

i open the spreadsheet that pretends to be my work. i scroll past it. i pull a tab that has been open since spring on motley fool nvidia, the headline still cheerful, the chart underneath still doing what charts do, which is to say nothing definitive while looking very confident.

i’m at my desk. carla is in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor. it’s 4:51pm on a thursday and i have, by reasonable estimate, the rest of the morning. the planning meeting will not end early. nothing involving slides ever ends early. that’s a rule i made up but i stand by it.

here is the part that matters first: i don’t own any of the stock. i have never owned any of the stock. i have, however, lived next to a gpu that the_ex brought home from work and treated like a nervous houseplant. that gpu is, technically, the only nvidia exposure of my life. it left when she left. i kept the apartment and the older fan noise.

if you want the full fool taxonomy and where motley fool sits inside it, the pillar covers it. i’m not going to recap. i’m going to do the thing i do, which is take a financial brand and a chip and a bar and turn them into the same paragraph.

motley fool nvidia, the coverage

here is what i have learned by reading, briefly, with intent. motley fool nvidia is not one article. it is a season. a body of work. it is, in fact, the kind of coverage where the headline this morning argues one thing and the headline next tuesday argues a softer version of the same thing, and both are signed by people with serious last names.

the coverage is, mostly, calm. they talk about earnings. they talk about guidance. they talk about gpu demand in a way that suggests gpu demand is a weather pattern, which is funny, because gpu demand is a weather pattern, and weather patterns are not investable, they are simply endurable.

i read three of the pieces. then i read a fourth because i was, in a real sense, avoiding the spreadsheet behind tab one. then i closed all four. tabs survive me. i am at 47 tabs as of this paragraph. that is, i am told, a personality.

A CHIP IS A CHIP. UNTIL IT IS A NARRATIVE.

why everyone covers nvidia, briefly

everyone covers nvidia because nvidia, at some point, became the company you had to cover. the way every newspaper, in a small town, has to cover the high school football team, even when the season is bad, even when the coach is on the way out. you cover it because the readers expect it. you cover it because the headline draws clicks. you cover it because the alternative is covering bond yields, and nobody clicks on bond yields, which is its own quiet tragedy, financially.

so when i type motley fool nvidia into the bar, i am not asking a question. i am, more honestly, performing a small ritual that millions of people perform at their own desks, on their own thursdays, while their own carlas are in their own meetings. we are all, together, watching the same chip do the same thing.

the chip, by the way, does not know.

this is, i think, the part that gets lost. the chip is in a server. the server is in a building. the building is in a state i will never visit. the chip is not aware that motley fool nvidia is a search term. the chip is doing what chips do, which is heat up and process and require a fan. the fan is louder than people think.

the ex had a gpu from work, i did not understand why

this is the personal part. i’ll keep it short, because i still own one tie and that’s enough sentiment for the morning.

the_ex had a job. the job, technically, gave her hardware. the hardware included a gpu, which is a graphics processing unit, which is the thing inside a computer that draws video games and now, apparently, draws the future. she brought one home for “a project”. the project was vague. the project ended. the gpu stayed.

i did not understand what it did. she would say things like “it’s training” and i would nod and pretend that was a sentence i recognized. the gpu would hum. the apartment would be warm in december in a way that other apartments were not. that was, in retrospect, the gpu doing its job. training. on what, i never asked. it would have ruined the moment, which already had several issues.

she left. the gpu went with her, which makes sense, because it was company property. she now lives, by all accounts, with the volvo guy. the volvo guy probably has his own gpu by now. the volvo guy is, statistically, the kind of person who keeps up.

i kept the apartment. the apartment, without the gpu, was colder. that is a fact i record without comment.

mike at the corner thinks gpu means something else

mike at the corner has not filed his taxes since 2019. mike has a system. the system is: don’t. mike’s system is, by some readings, working, in that mike is still alive and the corner is still open and the beer is still cold. by other readings, mike is one certified letter from a different life. both can be true. mike contains multitudes.

i told mike about motley fool nvidia. mike said “what’s a gpu”. i explained. mike said “so it’s a chip”. i said “a graphics chip”. mike said “for what”. i said “video games, mostly. and AI now.” mike said “AI”. mike took a long pull. mike said “AI is just three guys with a server”. i did not correct him because, on a long enough timeline, mike is right about most things, and on this one i was not in a position to argue.

mike then said the thing i’m going to be thinking about for the rest of the week. mike said: “a stock is a number you agree to be wrong about, together, for a while”. mike was, at the time, looking at a small jar of olives he was not going to eat. the jar was old. the olives looked tired. mike’s metaphor, however, was new. mike has metaphors. mike charges for them in beers.

i bought him another. i bought myself one. i remembered, with no warning, that cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner. this is a hot take i have defended at this exact bar, on a different evening, to a man who owned property and had opinions. mike agreed with the take. mike agrees with most takes. mike is, in his way, a generous audience.

the stefan-type expert at the bar had a take on chips

two stools down, a stefan-type was holding court. you can spot a stefan-type from across a room. the vest. the wine glass at a beer bar. the way they pronounce portfolio. the stefan-type was talking about chips, the financial kind, but using the word in a way that suggested he had never personally held one, which, fine, neither have i.

the stefan-type sent a link to my phone before we’d been introduced. the link was to a wine. the wine pairing, he said, was “for thinking about semiconductors”. i did not click. i did, however, think about it. that is, technically, what he wanted.

he said motley fool nvidia was “yesterday’s trade”. he said motley fool nvidia was “well-priced in”. he said motley fool nvidia was “a story that has already been told”. then he ordered another wine, at a beer bar, which is its own form of confidence i admire and will never replicate.

the air fryer i used once was, briefly, in my mind during this. the air fryer was on a bulk membership discount. the bulk membership is, by the way, also a card in my drawer, alongside the other card, the membership-shaped one i no longer use. memberships accumulate. they do not, in my experience, return calls.

i nodded at the stefan-type. nodding is free. nodding does not commit you to a position. i have built most of my adult life on this principle. it is, i would argue, the foundation of finance.

verdict — nvidia is a fool the market believed

here is my verdict, which has the legal weight of a napkin. motley fool nvidia is, on balance, a brand of coverage about a company that did, in fact, deliver, even when the people writing the coverage were unsure. that’s the rare arc. usually the coverage is right and the company is wrong. once in a while, the coverage hedges and the company runs through the wall anyway. nvidia ran through the wall.

i did not own it. i did not buy it. the_ex had the only gpu in my orbit and she took it with her, which is, i suppose, the most consistent financial story of my life. you can be in the room with the asset and still not be on the cap table. the cap table did not even know my name. the cap table, as far as i can tell, has never known my name.

if you want the cousin discussion of how all this connects to the larger taxonomy of being wrong about things confidently, i did the long version under moron — the historical bracket, where i admit the bracket fits. that post has nothing to do with nvidia. it has everything to do with how a moron ends up reading motley fool nvidia at 4:51pm on a thursday instead of doing the spreadsheet they are paid to do.

two related ones in this same neighborhood: the comparison i did between two cards i own under motley fool membership versus the bulk place membership, and the legal-suffix piece on motley fool llc and what those three letters protect. neither will make you rich. both will make you slightly less alone at your desk, which is, at the current rate, almost the same thing.

i closed the tab. i closed three tabs. i opened a fourth, which is how the tab count stays at 47, because i am, structurally, a closed system. then i went and got the bad coffee from the second-floor machine. the second-floor machine knows me. that is a kind of relationship.