US chipmaker Nvidia has replaced EV maker Tesla as Wall Street’s most traded stock by value. This has added another feather to its hat after becoming the third-most valuable US company and showing more evidence of how central AI-related bets have become to investors. However, the stock’s outsized representation in day-to-day stock trading could leave investors more vulnerable should the chipmaker’s revenue growth fail to meet investors’ high expectations and puncture a Wall Street rally that has been fueled by euphoria about artificial intelligence.
The California chipmaker will be coming out with its quarterly report late Wednesday. Strategists are cautious and critical as they believe that anything short of a blowout report could reverse a rally that has sent Nvidia’s stock soaring 40% in 2024.On Tuesday, the stock dropped about 5%, reflecting investors’ jitters ahead of the report.
About USD 30 billion worth of Nvidia shares were traded every day over the past 30 sessions, putting it ahead of Elon Musk’s electric car maker, which averaged USD 22 billion per day over the same period. The latter had been dominating the daily US stock trading since 2020, according to LSEG data. Over time, with high turnover, the stock’s share price multiplied by the number of shares exchanged, peaking above USD 35 billion several times in recent years.
Led by the AI boom, Nvidia, Super Micro Computer and another company accounted for 46% of all turnover of the 10 most traded US stocks – including Tesla, Meta Platforms, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Commenting on the turn of events, a trader at Triple D Trading in Ontario, Canada, Dennis Dick, told Reuters, “There’s an argument here that this is the dawn of a new era of trading, like the dawn of the internet, with Nvidia in the pole position.”
He also warned that sky-high turnover in AI-related stocks suggests that retail investors and algorithmic traders are driving share prices higher based on momentum rather than fundamentals, such as expectations of future revenue growth.
For Tesla, the going has been tough in 2024 with its stocks tumbling 23% so far in 2024 as it struggles with tepid demand for its electric cars and growing competition.