Nvidia Stock Is in a Slump. What Tesla Can Tell Us

Nvidia stock has dropped over the past few months. Investors should hang on—tight.

Nvidia stock has seen exponential gains in recent years.

Shares have fallen to $116, a 14% decline from their record close around $135, hit in June. They were down 38% to $98 at their lowest levels during this summertime drop. Through it all, the stock—which was flat in early trading Monday, while the benchmark S&P 500 were up 0.2%—remains up just about tenfold over the past five years. 

But investors should not rush for the exits: Research shows that a drop like this is normal, and even expected, for a stock like Nvidia, which has seen exponential growth in its share price.

A combination of related factors have driven shares of the artificial-intelligence leader lower. When Nvidia stock hit $135, investors took profits by selling. Emerging competition from chip makers such as Advanced Micro Devices threaten a small portion of Nvidia’s sales, making the smaller AMD maybe a more compelling buy at this point. And while AI chips are experiencing high and accelerating demand, everyone knows the growth for all chip makers will slow within the next few years. 

That’s not the end of Nvidia’s storybook journey. It’s completely normal for rare stocks with explosive growth curves to experience large declines periodically. Historically, the average maximum drawdown for stocks that went up tenfold in a five-year period is 48%, according to Trivariate Research’s analysis of 84 stocks that have achieved this feat.

The worst selloff is also nothing to worry about. Of the 84 names that Trivariate identified, the largest pullback was 89% for GameStop over the course of just over three years. But that stock is an outlier; GameStop didn’t rise because of company fundamentals. In fact, its earnings have beenshrinkingand its tenfold return in early 2021 was driven bythe Reddit meme stock craze.

Nvidia is nothing like GameStop. Analysts still expect the chip company to post double-digit annual earnings growth, in percent terms, over the next several years, according to FactSet. Nvidia stock now trades at a lower multiple of near-term earnings estimates, so continued earnings growth could take the shares higher from here.

That outlook makes Nvidia more like Tesla, which went up by more than 10 times during the five years ended in May 2017. Electric-vehicle demand, like chip demand today, was exploding. Within that five-year stretch, Tesla stock’s worst drawdown was 50% over a year-and-a-half period that ended in February 2016. Since then, shares have rocketed another 20 times. Yes, EV competition has emerged, but overall industry growth has still benefited Tesla. 

Maybe Nvidia has a similar future. Just hold on for the long-term.