NVIDIA Loses Almost the Entire Market Cap of Uber as Call Options Get Monetized

08.03.2024 - 20:37 / wccftech.com / Rohail Saleem

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

Such is NVIDIA's heft these days that even a moderate-sized selloff ends up making records on the stock exchange.

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At the time of writing, NVIDIA is down just around 5 percent in late-session trading. However, earlier in the session, the stock was up around 5 percent.

This ~10 percent correction, however, has ended up making records, courtesy of NVIDIA's gargantuan market cap that still resides well north of the $2 trillion level.

Do note that today's price action has not been prompted by any specific news. Instead, this is a classic response to a call-heavy regime. With the end of the week approaching, traders began exercising their in-the-money call options on NVIDIA earlier today. This then prompted option dealers to unwind their hedges by selling the underlying NVIDIA shares, compounding today's selloff.

NVIDIA closed at a market capitalization of $2.317 trillion yesterday. At the time of writing, the stock boasts a market cap of $2.18 trillion. This means that within a span of just a few hours, NVIDIA has lost $137 billion in market cap, or around 84 percent of Uber's entire market capitalization!

As we reported in a previous post, traders spent a whopping $20 billion betting on NVIDIA's options in the last week of February, eclipsing the rest of the "Magnificent 7" grouping of high-flying names by a wide margin. This options-heavy regime, however, is working against the bulls today.

Nonetheless, NVIDIA is likely to remain a momentum front-runner for the time being on the back of aggressive AI-related tailwinds. Consider the fact that the company's data center segment recently reported quarterly revenue of $18.4 billion vs. just around $3.6 billion in the comparable quarter last year. Moreover, the GPU manufacturer now expects to earn $24 billion, give or take 2 percent, in the ongoing quarter.

We noted recently that Nancy Pelosi had earned 10 years' worth of pay in unrealized gains in just 103 days by placing a smart bet on NVIDIA via deep-in-the-money call options. Today's selloff is likely to dampen the career democrat's gargantuan gains on this bet.