What happened
The Nasdaq Composite got thrown back on Thursday, and is down 1.4% as of 1:30 p.m. ET Meanwhile, one of its biggest components, semiconductor star Nvidia (NVDA +1.02%), is faring nearly three times worse -- down 4.1%.
What's got investors upset with Nvidia? Has someone on Wall Street gone and downgraded the stock?
Actually, no. Today's problem isn't that Wall Street hates Nvidia -- it's that it's ignoring Nvidia entirely.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
In a trio of positive pronouncements this morning, Japanese investment banker Mizuho Financial Group raised its price targets on semiconductor stocks nearly across the board, reports TheFly.com:
- Micron -- up 12% to a $110 price target.
- Western Digital -- up 11% to an $83 target.
- Advanced Micro Devices -- likewise up 11%, to $150.
And yet, there was no love for Nvidia from Mizuho. The analyst said not a word about it.
Now what
I don't think this is a reason for investors to worry. You see, while Mizuho didn't change its opinion on Nvidia today, that opinion was already pretty positive. Digging around in the ratings archives on StreetInsider.com, it turns out that Mizuho actually published a note on the semiconductor giant last week, and while this note didn't include a price target hike for the company, Mizuho did reiterate its buy rating on Nvidia stock, and its prediction that Nvidia will end this year at $335 a share -- 25% more than the stock costs currently.
Nvidia "continues to see strength," argued Mizuho last week, "with NO seasonality in gaming demand, low channel inventories, and supply potentially better in H2/22." On top of all that, Mizuho sees Nvidia as a great way to play the multiverse, estimating the size of the total addressable market for data centers needed to support Nvidia's Omniverse at greater than $100 billion.
Long story short, just because Mizuho talked about everybody but Nvidia today doesn't mean the analyst has forgotten about Nvidia entirely. Fact is, with a price target 25% above where it trades today -- versus potential gains of 11% to 12% for Micron, Western Digital, and AMD -- Mizuho actually likes Nvidia about twice as much as everybody else!
