Big Earnings Energy

Summary

Motley Fool Money Podcast Summary Episode: Big Earnings Energy
Release Date: April 17, 2025
Hosts: Dylan Lewis, Ricky Mulvey, Mary Long
Guest: Tim Byers

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1. Taiwan Semiconductor's Robust Performance Amid Trade Tensions

Overview:
The episode commences with Ricky Mulvey introducing the impressive earnings report of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). Despite ongoing trade tensions and tariffs, TSMC maintains a positive outlook, expecting mid-20% growth in revenue for 2025. This resilience is attributed to the company's dominant position in the global chip manufacturing industry, especially in advanced nanoscales.

Key Discussions:

• Management's Confidence:
  Tim Byers highlights the "swagger" in TSMC's earnings report, emphasizing their strong market position. He quotes TSMC's CEO, CC Way, stating, "[00:30] We understand there are uncertainties and risks from the potential impact of tariff policies. However, we have not seen any change in our customers' behavior so far. Therefore, we continue to expect our full year 2025 revenue to increase by close to mid-20s."

• AI as a Growth Driver:
  The conversation delves into the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in boosting TSMC's revenues. Byers explains that the demand for hyperscale AI compute remains robust, leading to increased manufacturing of high-performance chips essential for AI applications.

• Technological Advancements:
  Ricky discusses the significance of TSMC's advancements in chip technology, noting the efficiency gains from smaller nanometer chips. He remarks, "[02:04] We're talking about a lot of transistors going on one chip. Battery life is one example... packing on more transistors onto one chip means longer battery life for devices like newer iPhones."

Notable Insights:

• Operating Profit Margins:
  TSMC maintains close to a 50% operating profit, underscoring their substantial pricing power in the manufacturing sector.

• Clientele and Market Demand:
  The partnership with major clients like Nvidia amplifies TSMC's market dominance, ensuring sustained demand for their advanced chipsets.

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2. Netflix's Ambitious Goals for 2030

Overview:
Transitioning from semiconductor trends, Ricky introduces Netflix's lofty projections to triple operating income, double revenue, and achieve a $1 trillion market cap by 2030. Currently valued at approximately $430 billion, these targets represent a significant expansion.

Key Discussions:

• Strategic Requirements for Growth:
  Tim outlines the essential factors for Netflix to realize its goals:

  • Global ARPU (Average Revenue Per User): Increasing ARPU through successful ad tiers and expansion into new territories.
  • Content Globalization: Ensuring that content resonates and is accessible across different regions, enhancing ROI on content investments.

  "[07:49] Tim Byers: Global ARPU needs to go up as the ad tier gets successful... Netflix doesn't need to do new things. They just need to take their global customer base and get more from that global customer base."

• Content as a Strategic Asset:
  Byers emphasizes the importance of content that transcends borders, citing hits like "The Queen's Gambit" and "Squid Game" as examples of successful global content that drive high internal returns.

• Competitive Positioning:
  While acknowledging Netflix's strong position, Ricky expresses some skepticism regarding its ability to compete with conglomerates like Apple and Microsoft. However, Tim counters by highlighting Netflix's consistent profitability and global infrastructure advantages.

Notable Insights:

• Market Perception:
  Despite previous subscriber losses and stock sell-offs, Netflix is viewed as a relatively safe haven during economic downturns, with a subscription model that remains resilient.

• Future Risks:
  Tim points out that diversification away from the core streaming business into areas like gaming could pose risks. Maintaining focus on content and global expansion is deemed crucial for sustained growth.

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3. Nvidia's Challenges with Export Controls and Future Implications

Overview:
In the latter part of the episode, the hosts shift focus to Nvidia's recent struggles with export bans affecting their H20 chips. These bans prevent Nvidia from selling advanced AI chipsets to China, resulting in significant financial write-offs.

Key Discussions:

• Nature of the Export Ban:
  Tim explains that the H20 chip is a lower-tier, customized version intended for the Chinese market. The new licensing requirements imposed by the U.S. government have rendered approximately $5.5 billion worth of these chips unsellable in China.

  "[16:42] Tim Byers: The H20 looks to me like a customized version of their advanced AI chipsets for the Chinese market."

• Impact on Nvidia and AMD:
  The ban not only affects Nvidia but also AMD, forcing the latter to write off $800 million in inventory. This introduces uncertainty regarding Nvidia's dominant position in the AI chipset market.

• Technological Implications:
  The discussion delves into how export controls may incentivize competitors to develop alternatives to Nvidia's CUDA system. By bypassing CUDA, entities like Deepseek are creating tools that could weaken Nvidia’s competitive moat.

  "[23:57] Tim Byers: If you could create something that is an entire alternative to Nvidia and then just throw it out into the world, that could dramatically weaken Nvidia's moat."

Notable Insights:

• Potential Workarounds:
  Ricky mentions the possibility of Chinese entities circumventing export bans through shell companies, ensuring continued access to advanced chips despite restrictions.

• Market Valuation Concerns:
  Nvidia's stock, previously peaking with high valuation multiples, is now experiencing downward pressure due to these export challenges. Tim advises caution, noting that despite uncertainties, Nvidia's growth prospects remain strong but speculative.

  "[28:00] Tim Byers: There’s going to be some real movement to see what other countries and companies can do to break the hammerlock that Nvidia has had."

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4. Concluding Thoughts

The episode concludes with reflections on the interconnectedness of global markets and the strategic maneuvers companies employ to navigate regulatory landscapes. Tim Byers remains cautiously optimistic about Nvidia's future dominance despite current challenges, while Ricky Mulvey underscores the importance of staying informed and vigilant in investment decisions.

Final Quotes:

• "[29:11] Ricky Mulvey: If you've been waiting to buy shares of this super dominant tech stock, what say you, Tim?"

• "[29:18] Tim Byers: Those multiples you just introduced there... if the growth slows, then that kind of invalidates the peg ratio. So if you're going to speculate, please just be careful."

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Conclusion:
This episode of Motley Fool Money provides an in-depth analysis of key players in the technology and entertainment sectors. From TSMC's resilient growth amidst global trade tensions to Netflix's ambitious expansion plans, and Nvidia's strategic challenges with export controls, the discussion offers valuable insights for investors seeking to navigate these dynamic industries.

Transcript

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Foreign.

[Ricky Mulvey]

Netflix wants to be a trillion dollar company. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey, joined on the Internet today by Tim Byers. Tim, good to see you.

[Tim Byers]

Fully caffeinated, ready to go.

[Ricky Mulvey]

Ricky, today's a caffeine day. Okay, I'm good. I got, I got lucky.

[Tim Byers]

Caffeine day.

[Ricky Mulvey]

All right, let's start with, let's start with Taiwan Semi and see how caffeinated you are about this one. All right, we can talk about the business results, but I thought there was some swagger in this earnings report because here comes a large semiconductor company that says we're still expecting mid-20s growth in our outlook. We're maintaining the goals we set in January, never mind the tariffs. What, what do you make of management over at Taiwan Semiconductor maintaining this much swagger in a trade war?

[Tim Byers]

Yeah, big earnings, energy. In some ways you are seeing what it looks like when a well positioned company has a hammerlock on an important and emerging market.

[Unnamed Guest]

I mean that's what this is.

[Tim Byers]

Taiwan Semi still far and away the leader when it comes to global chip manufacturing, Ricky.

[Unnamed Guest]

And this is especially true at the.

[Tim Byers]

Nano scales where the highest performing chips are made. If we want to be more specific about this, just going to the conference call. CEO CC Way said in that call that TSMC essentially has seen no impact from tariff policy. So it's a little early and there is some swagger in this. But I just want to quote him here because I think this is an important quote. So we understand there are uncertainties and risk from the potential impact of tariff policies. However, we have not seen any change in our customers behavior so far. Therefore, we continue to expect our full year 2025 revenue to increase by close to mid-20s. So like, yeah, like no change in behavior. And the translation I have for that, Ricky, is just the tech world needs our production capacity and expertise and we're going to keep charging a premium for access to it. So it's a heck of a position to be in.

[Ricky Mulvey]

So no change in behavior yet. Still a fresh, a relatively fresh trade where we're not that far from liberation day. But in the meantime we're going to focus on the business results. This is really impressive to anyone. When you're a company that's worth more than, what is it, $600 billion. It's a lot to move the needle. Net income rising for Taiwan Semiconductor by 60% from the same period last year. Its high performance computing division is now about 60% of total revenue. That's a lot of cheddar what's behind these business results?

[Tim Byers]

Well, I think we know the answer and, and it is AI. Demand for hyperscale AI compute continues to be robust. And Way said this, he said that recent breakthroughs and introduce efficiency. So we're talking about things like deep seek only serve to democratize AI and increase the need for chips and compute that that TSMC manufactures. By the way, he is also sort of not saying exactly what Jensen Wong has said, but it's awfully close to.

[Unnamed Guest]

What Jensen Huang has said.

[Tim Byers]

He is parroting that message, but again, I think he's got a point here. You do not need to take my word for it. We can look at the numbers. So in Q1 58 of wafer revenue. So this is revenue directly from manufacturing the wafers that hold chips. You have wafers and on those wafers are a bunch of chips. And when you separate the chips out of the wafer, that's how semiconductors are manufactured. So 58% of that revenue was sourced at 5 nanometer or below. So that's the scale at where Taiwan Semi is producing the ultra high performance chipsets. And many of these are sure to be purpose built for AI training and inference. So that's what's going on here. This is an AI tailwind.

[Ricky Mulvey]

So one of the benefits of these very small 3 nanometer, 5 nanometer chips, it means that you can get the same performance for a lot less power or more performance for the same power. And it's worth noting just the tech we're talking about here, when we're talking about a 1 nanometer, that is about the length that your fingernail grows in one second. And these chips are so high. And, and if you think about it like you're not noticing how much your fingernails are growing in one day, hope hopefully you're noticing how much they're growing in one week. But this is insanely small stuff. We're talking about a lot of transistors going on to one chip. Battery life is one example. So if you have a newer iPhone, you may notice your battery goes on a lot longer than older iPhones. That's because they're packing on more transistors onto one chip. But whenever we're talking about Taiwan Semi, it's probably worth bringing Nvidia into the conversation. That's a big customer for Taiwan Semi. What can Nvidia do with these super small chips?

[Tim Byers]

You've got this right. More transistors in the space that you are producing the chip. And the multiplier effect here is so a GPU A graphics processing unit, which is, that's Nvidia's core business. You are pulling together quite a lot of relatively dumb high horsepower chips. And so a more efficient GPU built at smaller nanoscale is going to pack more of that dumb processing power into the same relative space. So it's just going like if we go the fast and the furious analogy.

[Unnamed Guest]

Here, Ricky, you got a whole lot.

[Tim Byers]

More nitrous is what you get here. So the technology is pretty complex here. And I asked, so like how much efficiency are we talking here? So I asked Gemini to describe the difference between 3 nanometer and 5 nanometer just to kind of put a finer point on this. And what it said was a 3 nanometer chip can have a transistor density of nearly 300 million transistors per square millimeter, or 5 nanometer chip has a density of 130 to 230 million transistors per square millimeter. So it's not quite a doubling. Let's say it's like 70% better. And that's just going down 2 nanometers. So you can see how this scales up pretty quick.

[Ricky Mulvey]

Last thing I'll note about Taiwan Semiconductor, what stood out to me, this is a company that maintains close to a 50% operating profit, which is a lot for a manufacturing company. Tells me Taiwan Semiconductor still a lot of pricing power there. And we're going to talk more about semiconductors later in the show. Tim and I have a deep ish dive on what's going on with the Nvidia export controls. But for now, actually we're still talking about pricing power because we're going to talk about Netflix, which reports later today, but it hosted its annual business review meeting just a few days ago. This is what the Wall Street Journal has reported on and what I want to talk to you about because they're really zooming out on the business here and management basically telling its investors this is what we plan to do by by 2030 we are going to triple our operating income, we are going to double revenue and we will achieve a one trillion dollar market cap. Right now Netflix is about a 430 billion dollar company. It needs to more than double by 2030. That's a lot. I want to start from a place of good intentions. Tim, what needs to go right for this to happen?

[Tim Byers]

Global arpu, that's average revenue per user needs to go up as the ad tier gets successful. You know, in other territories around the globe. They need to get footholds in other places. Another great sign would be more Content finding its way across borders, essentially, in order to do this, Netflix doesn't need to do new things. That's the point I want to underscore here. The reason I believe them is, is they don't have to do new things. What they have to do is take their global customer base and get more from that global customer base and then continue to grow that global customer base as they have been. The ad tier is going to be essential to this, Ricky.

[Unnamed Guest]

I really believe that.

[Tim Byers]

But I will say this idea of more content finding its way across borders, do not underestimate how important that point is every time content grows. So let's take the Queen's Gambit. Well, my favorite recent Netflix show, well, it's not that recent anymore, but it's relatively recent. Last few years, great show, has gone around the world and every time content goes multinational, it creates a massive ROI on the original spend. That's really important. The internal return on capital employed is really good for Netflix. This is why their margins can go up. So every time this happens, they just get fantastic internal returns on that content. If that continues, they can keep this up. And so you would expect to see like along the path here, Ricky, like more global content. More global content that they can market across borders. So like you could have Chinese language content that doesn't just appear in China, but appears in Chinese speaking territories.

[Unnamed Guest]

Right.

[Tim Byers]

You know, so you, you would expect things like that. But yes, they don't do a lot of licensing and I'm not really expecting them to, but that's something that is open to them later on in their life. They just don't need to do new things to do what they're talking about.

[Ricky Mulvey]

To do what they're talking about though is pretty incredible to join.

[Tim Byers]

Yeah, sure.

[Ricky Mulvey]

The legion of trillion dollar companies we're talking about like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, I think Berkshire Hathaway is up there.

[Tim Byers]

Right.

[Ricky Mulvey]

These like, at the end of the day, Netflix is an entertainment company with a subscription business. It's, it's consumer spending. It's not a large conglomerate. It's not doing, it's not the backbone of cloud computing. This is while pretty recession proof, this is a cost that people can cut and has some pretty fierce competitors. Sure, I'm a Netflix shareholder, but I don't know if I'm buying what management is selling here. How about you?

[Tim Byers]

No, I am. And I think the reason for this is because Netflix is the one streaming service that's been profitable and consistently so for years. Like as others have tried to scale up, Netflix has just grown more and more profitable. They've been doing this better than everybody else for a long time. And so the global infrastructure that everybody else needs, Netflix already has and that, that is a huge advantage for the company. And I, I don't think they ever get enough credit for that because let's be, let's be clear, Ricky, unless it.

[Unnamed Guest]

Is something that is marketed here in.

[Tim Byers]

The United States, we don't really see all of the amazing stuff they're doing in other territories. Like we see Narcos, we've seen Squid Game, but generally the hits that they have in other territories, we don't really see that. But they do have hits in other territories.

[Ricky Mulvey]

I was in Costa Rica in January and pulled up Netflix there. The movie selection when you get out of the United States, absolutely incredible. It's, yeah, it's, it's like I, I, if I were outside of the United States, I could not imagine ever canceling Netflix if I had the means to have.

[Tim Byers]

Right. And I, so I think this is, this is important. And I also will say this. Netflix gets the benefit of, they get benefits from their competitors. Here's the primary benefit. Every time you have a money losing streaming service and that is essentially all of them not named Netflix feeding the habit of streaming. What you're doing is saying, look, streaming is the default and Netflix is the big dog. You are advertising for Netflix by doing that, by creating and helping feed the paradigm shift. So yes, I think they are the big dog. I think they have a significant advantage in global distribution that their competitors are still a little, a little ways from matching.

[Ricky Mulvey]

One thing I've noticed about Netflix right now and the commentary around it, no one seems to be bearish on it. Just a few years ago, yeah, that's.

[Tim Byers]

A worry, isn't it?

[Ricky Mulvey]

Netflix lost some subscribers and there was a huge sell off in, in the stock. Now management a few years later very politely has said, we're no longer reporting subscriber numbers and times are good. This is a pretty safe haven from, from the tariff madness going on. A Netflix subscription is one of the last things to go in a recession for people. But because times are so good, because people are so bullish on this company, you can't find an analyst with a bearish thing to say about it. Let's be, let's, let's play the bear case. What would break your thesis for owning shares of Netflix?

[Tim Byers]

Yeah, the thing that would really screw it up for me, Ricky, is what Peter lynch famously called diversification. That's where you are taking the core business and saying, yeah, this core business is great, but there are other things we could do and you layer other things on top of it. So for example, they are experimenting with games, but they are not presently over investing in games.

[Unnamed Guest]

I find that to be good.

[Tim Byers]

If that changes and they start over investing in games, I'll get a little nervous. Or if they build Netflix land and just because they have the cash on their balance sheet to create a theme park, that doesn't mean they should do it. I don't think they will. If they did, I would find that really, really worrying. Netflix is fantastic at green lighting, small budget shows around the globe, a whole lot of them, and then nurturing. There's a lot of losers in that group, but they nurture just enough of the winners into viral hits that cross border quarters that produces very high internal returns. That's what they need to do. Just keep doing that and I think they'll be fine.

[Ricky Mulvey]

Let's leave it there. Tim Byers, appreciate your time and your insight. Thanks for joining us on Motley Fool Money.

[Tim Byers]

Thanks, Ricky.

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[Ricky Mulvey]

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[Ricky Mulvey]

All right, up next, Tim is sticking around to talk about the export ban that Nvidia is facing in the tech giant's current valuation. All right, Tim, before we get to the ban, I think it's worth discussing what is being banned here. What what is the H20 chip and where does it stand in sort of Nvidia's lineup of offerings?

[Unnamed Guest]

Yeah, this. So Ricky, the the H20 looks to me like a customized for the Chinese market version of their advanced AI chipsets. So I think you could think of this as the knockoff that you would buy at a dollar store that you could, it's for the lower income, can't afford the full brand, but you can have the low brand equivalent that you could pick up at your local dollar store. I think in this particular case it' the American government has been very clear for a while now. This is not just the current administration, this is the prior administration just said, like, look, China can't have the most advanced American chip technology, so you got to give them something else. But now it does appear that there are new licensing requirements. And these licensing requirements means that all of those H20 chips that were going to be sold now it appears $5.5 billion worth are now not gonna be sold into China. And they are the low budget, doesn't really work anywhere else type of chips. And so it becomes a write off for Nvidia, which is, I mean that's.

[Tim Byers]

A pretty big hit.

[Ricky Mulvey]

Yeah, I mean the US government, even through the Biden administration, as you mentioned, has restricted or I should say tried to restrict the sales of advanced chips to China. So this is big news for Nvidia. It's a big write off. So what's so new about this ban versus what had come previously?

[Unnamed Guest]

I think the licensing requirements and I have not seen anything that shows what these licensing requirements are. That's what the Trump administration has introduced and it's affected not just Nvidia, but it's also in fact affected AMD. So AMD now is going to write off $800 million worth of inventory and product that it can't sell now because of these new licensing requirements. What it looks like, Ricky, I can't say that I know exactly what it is because I'm not so sure it's been fully defined yet. But it looks like new requirements, new loopholes. I'm sorry, not loopholes, but hurdles that these chip manufacturers are going to have to go through in order to sell to China. Or it may just be that this is effectively a ban and there are gonna be no sales to China. I wouldn't predict that. I would rather say that whatever these new hurdles are, AMD and Nvidia will figure out how to meet those hurdles and then provide some kind of product into the Chinese market.

[Ricky Mulvey]

And I know you said this was the dollar store version of what Nvidia provided. The dollar store version of what Nvidia provides is still probably really good.

[Unnamed Guest]

Shop at dollar stores, Ricky. The dollar store versions are still good.

[Ricky Mulvey]

But why can't Nvidia sell this H20 chip to other customers?

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, I think because it's more customized and also because just technologically the power requirements, just some of the ways that the chip is limited just isn't going to work for markets where they are looking for a much more advanced chipset. I think it's more complicated than that. But, but bottom line, I think there are other markets that have moved on to more advanced platforms. These are not highly power efficient chips. They are memory hogs. They just aren't designed to perform in the way that the more advanced chipsets are. Other markets are going to be like, yeah, thanks, but no thanks.

[Ricky Mulvey]

This is more of a take, but I think it's important to bring in anytime we're discussing export bans. If the Chinese government really wants these chips, if they really want these AI chips, they can still probably get them. They might have to do some work with shell companies. They might have to buy them outside of China, but then bring them into China. But this is something they've been dealing with for a while. And Anna Swanson at the New York Times has reported in the past about how many of these super advanced chips and GPUs are still able to leak through export ban. So even though you set the rule, it may not be followed in the way you intended.

[Unnamed Guest]

I think that's exactly right. And I think just so we aren't too naive on this show and so that we don't, you know, let members believe that we are too naive, the most advanced chips will still find their way into China because that has been true for generations. How that happens is something that the US Government is going to continue to worry about and continue to crack down on. But yes, we should not pretend that the Chinese will not get access to sophisticated AI chipsets.

[Ricky Mulvey]

Meanwhile, they are trying to build up their own industry. Huawei is trying to build up its own supercomputer. You shared with me a newsletter that described where things stand in your view. Where does Huawei's supercomputers stack up to what Nvidia is providing right now?

[Unnamed Guest]

Well, this is full credit to Ben Thompson at Stratecheri and his newsletter. He was talking about this, about the 384 supercomputer, which is a highly inefficient but also highly powerful supercomputer designed off of their own chipsets. But I think the key here is that the Huawei supercomputer is something that we would not tolerate here on American shores because it is an absolute power hog. It is absolutely abusive in its use of memory, you would essentially be draining just extraordinary amounts of power in a data center like off Lake Erie somewhere. And you'd have houses flickering in the background because it was sucking so much power just in order to power these supercomputers. So it just doesn't work for us. But in China they have different needs, their pollution laws are different. So it works for China in order to just be a raw horsepower type of inference machine. And for their purposes they can do that. It's just not something that is likely to exist in a lot of economies outside of China.

[Ricky Mulvey]

One of the moats that Nvidia has with its chips and the CUDA software that it runs on or the CUDA system that it runs on, is that they only play nicely together. So if you want access to the system, you got to use Nvidia chips, which is the where a lot of AI architecture is built. Do you see competitors, maybe not Huawei, but other competitors that are going to build a more open offering in the near future? It seems like tech platforms are moving more towards that, or not moving towards. There's a lot of open source AI types of offerings, but not really within the architecture.

[Tim Byers]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Guest]

In this particular case, Thompson makes the argument, and I think he's right about this, is that the export bans have created a counter incentive. So at some point you do want to procure the most advanced American chips where you can get them, whatever ways you can get them. But you would also like to have your own alternatives. And in particular you would love to have a open source alternative to Cuda that would allow you to program any Nvidia chips you could get your hands on and any other chips you could get your hands on. Because you're right, Nvidia is highly vertically integrated. In order to best orchestrate and take advantage of Nvidia GPUs, you use the CUDA low level programming tool to do that. And that had been a real strategic advantage for Nvidia. If you want to have Nvidia chips, you got to use Nvidia Cuda. If you could do anything to break that hammer lock, that is good for China. But also the real judo throw here, Ricky, which Thompson makes in his newsletter, and I think he's right about this, is once they do that, they will do what they did with Deepseek. As soon as Deepseek came out and they said, hey look, we did something. And by the way, one of the most interesting parts of Deepseek was that they bypassed CUDA in order to make the Deepseek model, really super interesting. And build it on top of Nvidia chips by building down a level below where Cuda was and dropping into something that was kind of equivalent to assembly code. And you could think of it like programming directly into the silicon. Really hard things to do. But to make a more efficient model, similar idea. Could you create something that is an entire alternative to Nvidia and then just throw it out into the world and say, hey, by the way, we just dramatically weakened Nvidia's moat. Here's a free tool that's exactly like it. And you could do it to program any GPU, including Nvidia GPUs. There is a real incentive to do that. Now it's going to happen tomorrow. Is it going to happen within three years? I have no idea. But this is an example of when you have an economic force in place like export controls, you create incentives to get around those export controls any way possible.

[Tim Byers]

And in this case it makes me.

[Unnamed Guest]

Worry a little bit, not a ton, but just a small amount about Nvidia's mode.

[Ricky Mulvey]

And to be clear, this race towards AI supremacy was going on long before, long before these export controls.

[Unnamed Guest]

100%.

[Ricky Mulvey]

But the point you seem to be making is that maybe this speeds up, let's say, the shipments of sand going into Nvidia's boat to build islands there.

[Unnamed Guest]

I think that's right. I also think that the tougher the administration gets, gets at trying to crack down on China and prevent it from getting the most advanced AI equipment, the greater the incentive there is for the Chinese government, Chinese entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs around the world to figure out how to get around those restrictions.

[Ricky Mulvey]

I actually like hearing your concerns about this because Nvidia is the top dog. It is a dominant player. As I'm looking at the price tag on this stock right now, Nvidia is at about 42 times cash flow. It had flirted in the past with about 80 times cash flow. The PEG ratio, which is a price to earnings multiple that accounts for growth, is now at about 0.2. For those investors who have been waiting for the dip to buy to pick up some Nvidia shares, I remember when it was the hottest thing, it was trouncing the market cap of McDonald's in one trading session. Now investors are getting much more pessimistic. That might be a good thing. If you've been waiting to pick up some shares of this super dominant tech stock, what say you, Tim?

[Unnamed Guest]

I do think Nvidia is going to continue to be dominant for quite some time. What this does is it introduce the first real grain of uncertainty in Nvidia that I think we've seen in a while, that there's going to be some real movement to see what other countries and what other companies can do to break the hammer lock that Nvidia has had on this market that uncertainty creates. It does create downward pressure, yes. If you haven't ever bought any Nvidia shares, it may be an interesting time to at least think about it. What I will say, though, Ricky, is those multiples you just introduced there, they're still, you know, like that 0.2 peg ratio. That only matters if the growth rate continues as it has. And if the growth slows, then that kind of invalidates the peg ratio. So if you're going to speculate, please just be careful. I hate to sound like, you know, your old. Your old granddad here, but, like, be careful, son. You know, this is still a speculative stock.

[Ricky Mulvey]

I've got other companies on my watch list, but, yeah, Nvidia is there and probably rightfully so. Tim Byers, appreciate you being here. Thanks for your time and your insight.

[Unnamed Guest]

Thanks, Ricky.

[Ricky Mulvey]

As always. People on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. While personal finance content follows Motley fool editorial standards and or not appointments approved by advertisers, the Motley fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.