Caleb Silver's NVDA GTC 2026 Takeaways, Mag 7 Conviction Trends

0:00joining me now to discuss the latest retail investor activity. We want to welcome in our next guest, that's Caleb Silver, editor and chief of Investor of PDA. Caleb, good to see you. Good to be with you, happy St. Patrick. Happy St. Patrick's Day. All right, let's talk in video GTC. We had Jensen Wong's keynote yesterday, talking about a trillion dollars in demand through 2027, rolling out next gen Rubin platforms. From a retail investor perspective, because you always have key insight there, what if some of your takeaways? Yeah, a trillion dollars sounds really cool. And when investors share a trillion dollars over the next few years, they get pretty excited about that. Good for a little movement in Nvidia shares, which have been basically flat so far this year, along with a lot of the max seven, which is doing even worse. That said, it's all about what NVIDIA says about the future and the future is all about viewer Rubin, this next gen AI platform. They're targeting the rise of AI factories. How scary does that sound? It's great if you're an investor, because that means a trillion dollars basically in spending and they also roll down Grock

1:01through the language processing unit, talk more about the partnership with Uber. Nvidia everywhere right now, but moving into the higher margin areas where they always seem to find a lot of ways to make profits. One of the things that also stood out to me is space. It feels like there's also the space race that's happening and why not put data factor or data centers there as well, because I guess we're messing everything up on Earth. I know that that's not the reasoning that's given, but what resonated with you about that? Yeah, just the fact that they're looking for different ways to expand their mode and their mode now extends potentially into outer space. They're getting into the vehicle space ready with the drive AV software. Space seems like the next frontier for a lot of these companies. You've been hearing it from Tesla for years. No surprise that we heard it from NVIDIA, but what investors really want to know is, are you going to maintain that dominant market share in the GPU AI processing unit and everything he said so far would indicate yes, and the fact that he used the T word, the trillion word, that gets investors excited.

2:02We think about the AI narrative for a little while before the geopolitical conflict. There were starting to be a lot of worries about AI disruption and is the value there? Are we delivering on the monetization of AI? Where do you think the narrative is now? Yeah, well, investors are distracted because there's a huge geopolitical event right now that is pretty much moving the markets with headlines. We just saw a rise in oil, markets under pressure today as usual, but so investors are focused on that. Whether there's going to be a payoff for the AI spend still doesn't matter because all these companies have the pedal to the metal when it comes to spending on compute and keep hearing that word over and over again. Compute either on an enterprise level or now at the factory level for AI factories. So the spend is going to continue, profits hopefully will come, but NVIDIA giving us a good signal yesterday saying, they intend to continue to grow their profits 50, 70%. And that's good news for investors. What do you think about the factory level? Does that mean that AI is moving from, you know, moving more of the infrastructure story forward like the cloud, you know?

3:03Yeah, absolutely. And that's where you've seen a lot of the profit margins grow. We've looked at where the big spending is happening. It's happening. I'm building out the AI factories, building out the AI data centers. The real money is at the enterprise level. The computers that run the computers and the even bigger computers that are running these AI service centers. But that's where the money is and that's where the big profits have come for NVIDIA for AMD as well and for other companies that are trying to move into the space. Let's talk about NVIDIA's performance. So, because you just mentioned the Mag 7 earlier and it's been since, so sometime last year, it's been kind of the mess seven for some of them, right? And, you know, you wonder if there's now like a sentiment shift. How are retail investors feeling now about NVIDIA and others within the Mag 7? These are still the most widely bought stocks by retail investors, no matter what whether it's passive to the 401Ks or to find contribution plans or whether it is off of those plans when I look at Van to track data, even if the Schwab Stacks index. These are the stocks that individual investors

4:03keep buying all the time in NVIDIA, Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, even Bumble which rolled out a new dating AI system what could go wrong there and then the oil ETFs. That's where retail investors have been putting their money to, we're always a little late to the party but we always continue to buy our favorite stocks. This is that group. So, I'm gonna get into Bumble in a minute because I saw that in your data points and I was like, what? Okay, but let's, when you think about say NVIDIA, Tesla or even Palantir, are retail investors chasing this or is there still conviction around it? Conviction and it almost feels like a safety trade when you get all this turbulence, when you get all this volatility in the stock market. Some of these stocks have actually catching a bid and if you look at the Mag 7, just over the past couple of weeks, there's still a bid there to be caught when you see individual investors jumping in. They assume that these stocks are gonna continue to go back up. I don't know if we're living a fallacy or not but we're so used to these stocks delivering that it's hard to turn your back on them and when you see a stock like a Microsoft falling 20%

5:05and you're watching it as an individual investor who has followed this company for 20, 30 years, you're gonna keep buying that stock and that's exactly what individual investors keep doing. Even amid the volatility, you see the big stocks catching retail bills. There are different analysts who say that where Microsoft is now, I mean, basically oversold and so it makes sense that you see retail investors saying, okay, there's still something there. I wanna go back to Bumble and the AI adoption. So Bumble's actually out performing the S&P 500 so far this year. I don't know if this is an AI story. I am so, well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Everybody's got AI. But what's the story here? Yeah, it's a dating assistant that doesn't mean it's gonna go with you on your date. What should I say next or what should I order? Which fork should I use? It's a matchmaking AI assistant. They just slapped AI on it. They've probably been using it for years, gave it a fancy name, good for a rally and the stock, but all of these companies are looking for ways to whatever they do, more efficient, more workable and dating seems to be a place

6:06where you can actually get some efficiency. Having online dated myself or used the platform but I have a feeling just by saying they have an AI dating assistant, that's got investors pretty excited. Because you got married before the, you know, I got married before these. That's not true. We were faxing each other. Okay, but, you know, I'm surprised it's like AI arranged marriage. I mean, listen, there's love is blind now. So, you know, whatever way works is what works. When you think about the focus of retail investors, is the focus now on the headlines, such as what institution on the search are wide? Headline driven, most passive investors are just saying, what can I do, what should I do? I'm just going to keep contributing to my 401K as usual. We don't make a lot of changes. When you think about the broader pool outside of the folks who are investing on their own, yeah, it's headline driven. When you look at the top performing stocks, though, retail investors basically aren't in any of them. Here they are, since the mid-east war begins, CF industries, that's a capital, fertilizer, chemical company, up 27%.

7:09Lionel Basel, another chemical company, Dow, a chemical company, why? Because the pressure on oil is putting pressure on all the oil derivatives. Fertilizer, chemicals, eventually the food supply, and that's why you have this inflationary to bubbling up again, which all comes to a head, as we know, starting today and into the Fed decision, no decision tomorrow. All right, yeah, that's the expectation. All right, thank you, Caleb. You're my pleasure. That's Caleb Silver, Editor-in-Chief of Investopedia. Appreciate it.