In September 2022, former hedge fund manager and Mad Money host Jim Cramer said he was short Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) stock, calling it ‘a loser.’
At the time, shares of the tech giant were trading at around $130 per share after struggling in the broader market downturn triggered by challenging macro conditions involving record-high inflation and interest rates.
Roughly 8 months later, on May 25, Nvidia’s shares are trading at $384.13, surging more than 192% since Cramer’s short bet. The stock closed at $305.38 per share on Wednesday, May 24, before jumping over 26% in extended trading after issuing a current quarter sales forecast that smashed Wall Street expectations.
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Nvidia gained roughly $200 billion during the last 90 minutes of after-hours trading due to the surge in share price.
Nvidia shares surge on Q2 2024 guidance
Nvidia’s most recent share price leap, one of many this year, came after the chipmaker reported earnings for its fiscal Q1 2024, which topped analyst consensus estimates.
The company reported adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.09, compared to analysts’ expectations of 92 cents.
Revenue came in at $7.19 billion, while analysts were looking for $6.52 billion.
But most notably, Nvidia issued a much stronger-than-expected forecast for the current quarter, saying it expects sales of around $11 billion, plus or minus 2%. The figure was over 50% higher than Wall Street’s projection of $7.15 billion.
The huge guidance beat comes amid “surging demand” for Nvidia’s data center products, the company’s CEO Jensen Huang said. Before the after-hours stock jump, Nvidia’s shares were already up 109% year-to-date, fueled by robust interest in its artificial intelligence (AI) chips.
Analysts’ reaction
Nvidia’s sales guidance took analysts from prominent Wall Street finance firms aback, with many of them significantly raising their price targets on NVDA.
“In the 15+ years we have been doing this job, we have never seen a guide like the one NVDA just put up with FQ2 outlook that was by all accounts cosmological, and which annihilated expectations,” said analysts at Bernstein.
Similarly, financial experts at Rosenblatt almost doubled the price objective on Nvidia shares to a fresh Wall Street high of $600 per share, citing an “epic print and guide.”
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that earlier this week, Finbold highlighted NVDA stock as one of the three chipmaker stocks to keep an eye on in the wake of recent China’s crackdown on Micron, marking the latest escalation in the tech dispute between Beijing and Washington.
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