Friday, January 31, 2025
The blogger who helped spark Nvidia’s $600 billion stock collapse and a panic in Silicon Valley
Market Extra
The blogger who helped spark Nvidia’s $600 billion stock collapse and a panic in Silicon Valley
Jeffrey Emanuel says Wall Street banks that are bullish on Nvidia ‘have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about’
Published:
Last Friday afternoon, Jeffrey Emanuel sat down in his Brooklyn apartment and started writing a blog post. For hours, he pounded away on his keyboard while his wife kept their young children occupied and brought him food. Emanuel worked late into the night, and by early Saturday morning he had written nearly 12,000 words.
Emanuel’s manifesto made the case for shorting the hottest company in the stock market, Nvidia Corp.
But then the post started to go viral.
By Saturday night, Emanuel could see that 1,500 people across the world were reading his blog post at a given moment. Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel’s post on Nvidia’s short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers. Jared Friedman, a partner at venture-capital firm Y Combinator, referred to it in a post that was reposted by the official Y Combinator account. Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel’s own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers.
In an interview with MarketWatch, Emanuel said that at one point the traffic crashed his website, so people started sharing an archive link, which his website-analytics tool couldn’t track.
But one thing it did pick up was that by the end of the night, the city with the most concurrent readers was San Jose, Calif. — near where Nvidia’s corporate headquarters is located.
Emanuel’s argument shook Silicon Valley not because he claimed that the big U.S. technology companies were misleading or deceitful. His main point was simply that they were nowhere near as smart and efficient as Wall Street was touting them as. The big tech companies had built and trained their artificial-intelligence breakthroughs using tremendous amounts of data and advanced compute resources that required them to pay for Nvidia’s data-center hardware, which is sold at very high gross margins. Emanuel pointed out that a China-based company, DeepSeek, had recently launched its own top-notch AI product using fewer expensive chips. In other words, DeepSeek had achieved what the big AI companies had, but with far less money. What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.
Then on Monday things got real. Nvidia’s stock plummeted about 12.5% at market open and continued falling from there. By the end of the day, the slide had wiped out nearly $600 billion from Nvidia’s market capitalization — the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company. Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel’s post “was an important catalyst” for the stock-market selloff and said it was a “candidate for the most impactful short research report ever.”
Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI.
“I’m so exhausted, I’m losing my voice practically,” said Emanuel. “It’s been the most surreal experience of my life.”
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JBLU stock | Earnings dip | Rebound 10% | Jan 31 2025
JetBlue (JBLU) Stock Surges Amid Investor Optimism
JetBlue Airways (JBLU, Financial) shares experienced a notable rise of 10.36%, reaching $6.975. This uptick comes after a period of volatility for the airline, largely influenced by its recent fourth-quarter results and a conservative outlook for 2025.
Currently, JBLU has yet to recover to its pre-pandemic levels, remaining about 60% below its past highs. Over the last three years, the stock has seen minimal movement, primarily due to regulatory setbacks such as the blocked acquisition of Spirit Airlines, which stifled potential expansion plans.
Despite these challenges, JetBlue is focusing on streamlining its operations by phasing out older aircraft and investing in new, fuel-efficient models, which aligns with its broader restructuring strategy. The company’s liquidity position remains strong, supporting these initiatives.
In terms of valuation, JetBlue is currently trading with a price-to-book ratio of 0.92, indicating it might be undervalued relative to its assets. However, the company has a critical Altman Z-Score of 0.7, placing it in the distress zone with a potential risk of financial instability. Furthermore, JetBlue has a GF Value of $7.04, which categorizes it as "Fairly Valued" according to GuruFocus. For more details on JBLU's valuation, visit the GF Value page.
Looking ahead, JetBlue faces significant financial challenges, including continuous debt issuance and low operational profitability, as highlighted by its operating income losses reported in 67% of the past 12 quarters. Yet, the company's Beneish M-Score suggests it is unlikely to manipulate financial statements, lending some confidence to cautious investors.
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Nvidia Shorts Made a Killing on the DeepSeek Drop. It May Not Last.
Nvidia Shorts Made a Killing on the DeepSeek Drop. It May Not Last.
Jan 28, 2025, 2:00 pm EST
Investors who bet against Nvidia on Monday made a killing, but shorting
the stock may now be tougher, making it costlier to bet against the AI chip
giant.
The stock, along with Broadcom, another chip company hit hard in Monday’s
DeepSeek selloff, was restricted from short-selling on the Interactive Brokers platform Tuesday morning after
triggering a Securities and Exchange Commission circuit breaker known as the
“uptick rule.”
That rule can
put the brakes on shorting a stock after shares decline more than 10% from
their previous close. It can come into effect as a kind of circuit breaker to
prevent hedge funds and other traders from ganging up on a stock, essentially
requiring short-sellers to wait in line behind traders seeking to sell their
shares.
It’s unclear if the pause was widespread. Shares appeared
available for shorting on the Fidelity platform on Tuesday, for instance. JJ
Kinahan, CEO of IG North America, which owns the tastytrade online brokerage,
said it was not restricting short sales of Nvidia Tuesday. The Nasdaq exchange,
where Nvidia is listed, told Barron’s it was looking into the
matter.
Shares rebounded Tuesday, gaining nearly 9%. Steve Sosnick,
chief strategist with Interactive Brokers , told Barron’s that
the uptick rule would last the rest of Tuesday. And since the stock didn’t
suffer another 10% drop, short sellers won’t have to wait in line come
Wednesday.
Betting against Nvidia has been an awful trade for short
sellers. But it was terrific on Monday. The stock’s 17% plunge led to a one-day
profit of $6.56 billion for Nvidia shorts, according to research from S3
Partners. Nvidia shorts were up nearly 11% for the year on this trade before
Tuesday’s comeback. Shares are now down just 4% this year.
Investors who bought leveraged single stock exchange-traded
funds in Nvidia—which amplify their short or long positions in a company
through the use of financial derivatives and debt—made an even bigger profit
Monday.
The Tradr 1.5X Short NVDA Daily ETF and GraniteShares 2x Short NVDA Daily ETF surged 25% and
34% respectively Monday as Nvidia’s stock tanked. Both ETFs fell Tuesday as
Nvidia’s stock bounced back.
Short sellers bet against stocks by borrowing shares and
selling them, hoping to profit from buying back the stock at a lower price and
pocketing the difference when returning the shares. If the stock price keeps
climbing, short sellers could lose their shirts since they eventually have to
repurchase the stock at a higher price than what they sold it at.
Monday’s gains from the selloff still pale in comparison to
the massive amount of money lost by traders shorting Nvidia, according to Ihor
Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics for S3 Partners.
The stock has been one of the market’s best performers for
the past few years thanks to demand for its AI chips. Nvidia soared more than
170% last year, for example. As a result, Dusaniwsky said Nvidia shorts lost
$24.24 billion in 2024, a decline of 81.3%.
Only about 1.2% of Nvidia’s total float was being held short
as of Monday, Dusaniwsky said, a sign the market is almost uniformly lined up
in support of the stock.
Whether short interest will start to creep up is an open
question as Nvidia becomes more of a battleground stock.
Dusaniwsky expects the shorts to be kept at bay, even though
it’s among the cheaper stocks to borrow. He said that since Nvidia is
considered “general collateral” because it is liquid and easy to borrow, the
borrowing fee for Nvidia is just 0.3%, compared to an average borrowing fee of
0.45% for U.S. stocks.
While Monday’s plunge “helped settle the nerves of the more
jumpy NVDA short sellers and helped them recoup a sliver of their 2024
mark-to-market losses, the move should not lure a large new cadre of short
sellers since most NVDA short sellers are already in the trade,” Dusaniwsky
said in an email. He added that if Nvidia continues to drop, shorts may add to
their exposure, “but its volatility and upward stock price bias will limit
surges in short selling.”
Short sellers overall tend to be more wary of megacap stocks
because they are more widely followed by analysts who tend to be bullish and
have support from big institutional investors, including index funds and
actively managed accounts.
Melissa Roberts, an analyst with Stephens, said in a report
Tuesday that short interest for the broader market was just 1.9% of total
shares as of mid-January. Meanwhile, short interest in small and mid-cap stocks
accounted for 6% of the market, up slightly from the end of December.
Others aren’t so sure the shorts will now stay away from
Nvidia. The emergence of potentially cheaper AI technology from DeepSeek and
other Chinese companies may have changed the equation for Nvidia and other
companies that got a big bump in 2024 due to AI hype.
Armando Gonzalez, CEO of RavenPack, a financial data
provider for hedge funds and asset managers, said in an interview with Barron’s that
the Nvidia selloff was a “good wake-up call around the real value of large
language models” and that there is now a “risk of [AI technology] becoming more
commoditized.”
Investors betting against the AI leader probably should
still tread cautiously. Nvidia is still the king of AI and that likely won’t
change overnight.
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
Nvidia Stock Just Fell Below a Key Level. What That Means.
Nvidia Stock Just Fell Below a Key Level. What That Means.
Updated Jan 30, 2025, 4:12 pm EST / Original Jan 30, 2025, 3:19 pm EST
Updated Jan 30, 2025, 4:12 pm EST / Original Jan 30, 2025, 3:19 pm EST
The broader
stock market rose Thursday, but for much of the day, Nvidia
investors weren’t taking part in the rally. Fans of the AI chip giant
may need to get used to being left behind.
Shares of Nvidia ended
Thursday up 1% to about $125, but shares spent most of the day in red and
briefly dipped below a key technical measure. That could mean more downside
ahead.
Nvidia NVDA+0.98%
stock has now tumbled nearly 7% so far this year. Earlier Thursday, the
shares stumbled to around $118, breaching their 200-day moving average around
$122. This figure—calculated by taking the average closing price of a stock
over the prior 200 trading days—is often viewed by technical analysts as a key
resistance level, or a floor for a stock if you will. Once a stock goes below
that, some fear that there’s much more room to fall.
Nvidia has been rocked this week due to worries about
competition from cheaper artificial-intelligence technology from China,
following the release of a new AI chatbot app named DeepSeek. Short
sellers—investors who bet that a stock will go down —piled
into Nvidia’s shares Monday, compounding the selloff that ultimately
resulted in the stock’s one-day drop of 17%.
Interestingly though, Nvidia’s near-term market woes
are n’t
creating a sense of panic for stocks overall, the tech sector’s Magnificent
Seven, or even the rest of the semiconductor sector.
The PHLX
Semiconductor Index SOX
+2.29%, which includes Nvidia, jumped more than 2% Thursday and has stabilized
since Monday’s crash. It’s also worth noting that several other big chip
stocks, such as Broadcom AVGO
+4.51%, ARM
Holdings, Marvell
Technology, and Taiwan
Semiconductor rallied Thursday and are trading above their 200-day
moving averages.
The Roundhill
Magnificent Seven exchange-traded fund is also about 20% above its
200-day moving average, a sign that the DeepSeek scare hasn’t hurt tech
heavyweights Apple, Microsoft, Meta
Platforms, Amazon.com, Alphabet,
and Tesla.
So the Nvidia selloff might not be a sign of further
weakness in tech overall. It could simply be the case that Nvidia’s shares,
which more than doubled in 2024, needed to cool off a bit.
When discussing Nvidia and DeepSeek, Wall Street may be
talking a lot about the so-called Jevons
Paradox, the notion that a decline in something’s price will lead to higher
demand. But Isaac Newton’s more famous line about the law of gravity might best
describe what has happened (and could happen next) for Nvidia stock: What goes
up must come down.
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Telerik | Combobox update | Add image | Checklist
- First publish the update, and worked on Telerik exception - Server: .NET framework - 3.5 or 4.5 need upgraded
- Restored old version
- Tried again, learned a few things
- Tried to add a new page to test, and keep DropDownList aspx page working
- Try to test Combobox example - also failed
- Windows server 2012 R2 - download .NET framework 4.8
- Telerik Combobox upgrade - working
May 14, 2024-Security and Quality Rollup for .NET Framework 4.8 for Windows Server 2012 R2 (KB5037923)
The May 14, 2024 update for Windows Server 2012 R2 includes cumulative security and reliability improvements in .NET Framework 4.8. We recommend that you apply this update as part of your regular maintenance routines. Verify that you have installed the required updates listed in the How to get this update section before installing this update.
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Telerik | App_Licenses.dll | ASP.NET application
"Telerik app_Licenses.dll" is a file used to store license information for Telerik UI components within an ASP.NET application, essentially acting as a verification mechanism to ensure that you are using a purchased, valid license for the Telerik controls in your project, preventing trial limitations or copyright messages from appearing in your deployed application.
Key points about app_Licenses.dll:
- This DLL contains details about your Telerik license, allowing the application to check if you have a valid license to use the Telerik controls commercially.
- When you include Telerik controls in your project, the application automatically checks the information within this file to determine if you are authorized to use the controls.
- If you are using a trial version of Telerik, the application might display trial limitations or copyright messages, but once you purchase a license and update the app_Licenses.dll file, these limitations should be removed.
Important considerations:
- While this file is crucial for development and testing, it is typically not directly deployed to a production server as the license information is embedded within the DLLs themselves.
- You can usually find the app_Licenses.dll file in the root directory of your web application.
Monday, January 27, 2025
The Telerik C# Web Forms site template in Visual Studio | Telerik
To install the Telerik C# Web Forms site template in Visual Studio, you need to download the Telerik extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace, then when creating a new project, choose the "Telerik Web Forms Application" template, which will provide you with a pre-configured project including Telerik controls ready to use in your web forms application; make sure to have a valid Telerik license to access the full functionality.
Key steps:
- Open Visual Studio.
- Go to Tools > Extensions and Updates.
- Search for "Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX" and download the extension.
- Click File > New > Project.
- Select "ASP.NET Web Forms Application".
- Under "Installed Templates", choose "Telerik Web Forms Application".
- Name your project and click "OK".
Important points to remember:
- You need a valid Telerik license to access the full range of controls and features.
- You can also install Telerik controls directly through NuGet packages in an existing ASP.NET Web Forms project.
- Once the project is created, you can drag and drop Telerik controls from the Visual Studio toolbox onto your web forms.
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