Nvidia is a 'tremendous buying opportunity,' Evercore says (NVDA)

pulse

April 9, 2018 5:56 PM

"We continue to view NVDA as the best growth story in large cap," Evercore said.

The chipmaker has seen its stock decline 10% this year as cryptocurrency prices tank.
"We continue to view NVDA as the best growth story in large cap," the analyst said.

Nvidia's crypto boom is officially over, but the recent selloff presents investors with a "tremendous buying opportunity," according to Evercore.

"We believe NVDA will likely power through any tough compares from Crypto-driven tailwinds (though exact numbers are difficult to know for sure in Crypto)," analysts led by C.J. Muse said in a note to clients last week. "The current sell-off in NVDA thus seems overdone and offers a tremendous buying opportunity."

Both Nvidia and its competitor AMD enjoyed a massive surge in demand for their graphics processing unit chips, once only popular among PC gamers, to mine cryptocurrencies. Evercore now joins the ranks of other Wall Street analysts in declaring this boom over.

"While the Blockchain software technology is here to stay ... we expect crypto-mining will be a much less meaningful market for AMD/NVDA in 2018," Vijay Rakesh, an analyst at Mizuho Securities said in a note to clients out in late November.

What's more, Evercore says any concerns of processors no longer wanted by miners who can't find profitability in mining at 2018's low prices are overblown. A new application-specific machine, or ASIC, for mining Ethereum will also hit the market this summer, which could further slump demand for Nvidia chips.

Still, gaming was one of Nvidia's fastest-growing segments in 2017 compared to the previous year. That growth, coupled with expansion in autonomous vehicles, is behind Evercore's outperform rating for the stock, with a price target of $275 — 24% above where shares were trading Monday.

Since the beginning of 2018, Nvidia's shares have risen by 9%, compared to the benchmark S&P 500 index's 1.87% loss.

"We believe lower demand volatility driven by secular trends (vs. cyclical cryptocurrency-driven moves) will over time drive lower volatility in the stock, helping multiples and creating a sticky investor base longer-term," the firm said. "We continue to view NVDA as the best growth story in large cap."