저자: TomLee · 외국인
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엔비디아 호실적에도 대형 기술주가 약세인 괴리를 설명. 엔비디아 PER은 낮고 실적이 밸류를 낮춘다고 주장. 소프트웨어(Salesforce, CrowdStrike, Okta)로 AI 수혜가 확산 중이며 건강한 상승. 데이터센터 정치 이슈와 수출규제·대만 리스크 언급. 머니마켓 6조달러 현금이 증시를 받쳐 추가 상승 여력이 있고, 금융·산업재로 상승폭 확대 전망.
다듬은 글
Why did Nvidia's blockbuster earnings report trigger a sudden sell-off across almost every other major technology stock? During a recent appearance on CNBC with host Scott Wapner, Tom Lee, the head of research at Fundstrat, unpacked this strange market divergenc institutional investors are shifting their capital, how Nvidia's valuation remains surprisingly cheap, and the hidden political threat that could derail the entire AI infrastructure build-out.
; Tom Lee, he is Fundstrat's managing partner, head of research, also a CNBC contributor. It's good to have you back. Great to see you, Scott. at the very top of the show, it's kind of peculiar the market reaction to this today. Nvidia's having a great day, but it's kind of mixed elsewhere. What What do you make of that?
Uh I I mean, I think it's a healthy market, Scott, because Nvidia had good numbers, so you want um Nvidia to go up on good news, which it did. It's having a Which it rarely does. Yeah, and it's rare, so it's breaking a pattern of people thinking people don't care about the earnings. It really did matter.
And I think that we are seeing a positive response in software, which of course is on good numbers, and there and those names are downstream of the AI trade. So, I I think it's actually an overall healthy reaction. the the software moves are so specifically related really to what we got from Salesforce and CrowdStrike and Okta Okta and and and others.
I find it interesting that Meta's down, Amazon's down, Alphabet's down, AMD's down, Micron's down, Marvell's down, Coreweave's down. I wouldn't have expected that after Nvidia delivered what they did. Yeah, I mean, it's also possible people were using those names and not having exposure to Nvidia, so they've got to find a source of funding if they have been underweight Nvidia.
And again, I've heard it from many guests on CNBC, the thing that stands out is Nvidia's multiple is still very low, so they have got these huge revisions, the stock hasn't kept up. Now, the PE keeps contracting. Yeah, what about the data center debate, speaking of the midterms? That's only going to grow louder as you approach election day.
Now, we're still a few months away from that. Yeah. But that feels like it's at play here, too, in why the market and those specific names haven't traded all that well lately. That's right. It's becoming a actually a an issue that resonates with voters, and it looks like it's turned already some elections like in Ohio.
And then we're seeing governors in Republican states and pro-data-center states, you know, supporting a pause. So, you're absolutely right. It's become a political issue. I don't know if this is also maybe fueled by China, which wants the US to slow down its AI efforts. But you're right. It's It's becoming an issue, and that's probably why the downstream trades are doing better, the AI downstream trades.
What What about outside of tech and and AI? Have Have you Take your lens, you know, in in in in that direction. What do What do you see that you like? When we look closely at the day's price action, Nvidia surged on its blowout numbers, but its mega-cap peers experienced a sea of red. Scott opened the conversation by pointing out how peculiar the market reaction felt, noting that while Nvidia was having a great day, the rest of the market was highly mixed.
To understand why this happens, we have to look at the psychological state of Wall Street. Typically, when a stock is as widely followed and heavily anticipated as Nvidia, a great earnings report is met with profit taking. Traders call this selling the news. But Tom responded by arguing that the market's reaction was actually incredibly healthy.
He pointed out that you want a company to rise when it delivers good news, and the fact that Nvidia did exactly that shows the market's underlying strength. What makes this reaction even more interesting is how it rippled into specific pockets of the tech sector. Tom highlighted that we are starting to see a positive response in software names that are downstream of the AI trade.
He specifically mentioned companies like Salesforce, CrowdStrike, and Okta, which had recently put up strong numbers of their own. My take on this is that we are witnessing a crucial transition in the technology cycle. For the past 18 months, the AI trade has been almost exclusively focused on hardware and infrastructure, the physical picks and shovels of the digital gold rush.
Now, we are starting to see the value flow downstream into the application layer. When Tom pointed to Salesforce, CrowdStrike, and Okta, he was highlighting a fundamental shift in how Wall Street is allocating capital. Up until now, investors were deeply skeptical about whether software companies could actually monetize artificial intelligence.
The fear was that corporate budgets were being frozen just so companies could afford to buy more advanced silicon. But as these enterprise software names report solid earnings and demonstrate clear paths to integrating generative tools into their core platforms, that skepticism is beginning to melt away.
The massive capital expenditures we have witnessed from the hyperscalers are finally starting to translate into recurring software revenue. This rotation is exactly how a healthy bull market behaves. If only one stock rises while the rest of the market collapses, you have a market built on sand. But when the gains start spreading to software and cybersecurity, it proves that the underlying technology is actually being adopted, not just hoarded in data centers.
My take on this is that we are moving out of the purely speculative phase of the tech cycle and into the actual deployment phase. It is no longer just about who is buying the chips, but who is building profitable products with them. But Scott did not just let Tom paint a completely rosy picture. He immediately pressed him on the elephant in the room, valuation.
How can a stock that has run up so far, so fast, possibly have any upside left? Scott asked if we are simply repeating the mistakes of the late 90s dot-com bubble, where investors paid any price for growth, only to get wiped out when reality caught up with the hype. It is a fair question, and it is the exact concern keeping many retail investors on the sidelines right now.
Are we buying at the absolute top of a historic bubble? Tom answered this concern by looking directly at the fundamentals, rather than the stock chart. He made a point that many market participants miss. A rising stock price does not automatically make a stock more expensive. If a company's earnings grow faster than its share price, the stock actually becomes cheaper on a valuation basis.
He explained that Nvidia's forward price-to-earnings multiple has actually compressed over the past year, even as the stock price broke through record after record. This is because their earnings beats have been so massive that they have constantly lowered the valuation multiple. Tom contrasted this with the peak of the dot-com era, when companies like Cisco traded at over 100 times forward earnings, while only growing their bottom line at a fraction of Nvidia's current rate.
. Where I land on this valuation debate is that Wall Street is still struggling to model exponential growth. Most analysts use linear models to project future earnings, but generative technology demand is scaling exponentially. When a company repeatedly beats expectations by billions of dollars, it forces the entire market to constantly recalculate what that business is actually worth.
That is why Nvidia can rise 10% in a single day and still end up with a lower forward multiple than it started with. It is a rare phenomenon, but it is exactly what happens when a company holds a virtual monopoly on the most critical commodity of the modern era. But this brings us to the hidden threat that Tom and Scott touched on later in the conversation, the geopolitical and policy risks that could bring this entire build-out to a sudden halt.
If Nvidia's valuation is justified by its growth, then the biggest risk to the stock is not a lack of demand, but an artificial disruption to its supply chain. Scott raised the issue of tightening government restrictions on advanced chip exports, particularly to Asian markets. What happens if Washington decides to tighten the screws even further, cutting off a massive portion of Nvidia's addressable market overnight?
Tom acknowledged that policy risk is indeed the most unpredictable variable in the entire equation. The government is walking a very tight line. On one hand, policymakers want to maintain technological supremacy and protect national security by keeping advanced silicon out of competitors' hands. On the other hand, if they restrict exports too aggressively, they risk choking off the very revenues that fund American research and development.
It is a delicate balance, and any sudden policy shift could instantly invalidate the aggressive growth assumptions currently priced into these stocks. My take is that the geopolitical risk is concentrated in two areas: export controls and Taiwan. Because almost all advanced chips are fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, any escalation in regional tensions represents a catastrophic single point of failure for the entire global technology sector.
Even without a military conflict, simple regulatory friction or export compliance hurdles can delay shipments and hurt quarterly numbers. Investors who are purely focused on Nvidia's quarterly beats are often ignoring how fragile the underlying logistics chain actually is. It is the classic risk that everyone acknowledges, but no one wants to price in until it is too late.
The conversation then shifted to the broader macroeconomic backdrop, and Scott wanted to know how the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy fits into Tom's bullish thesis. For months, the market has been obsessed with the timing and size of potential rate cuts. The consensus view has been that tech stocks need lower rates to sustain their high multiples.
But Tom took a very different angle here, one that challenges the conventional wisdom of high finance. He argued that the tech sector and the broader market are far less dependent on the Fed than most people think. To support this, Tom pointed to the massive wall of cash sitting on the sidelines. There is currently over $6 trillion parked in money market funds earning a safe 5% yield.
That cash did not accumulate because investors were bullish. It accumulated because they were terrified of inflation, rising rates, and a potential recession. But as inflation continues to cool and the economy remains resilient, that safe yield is going to look less and less attractive. Tom believes that even a minor rotation of that cash back into equities will create a massive structural bid under the market, regardless of whether the Fed cuts rates twice, once, or not at all.
What I find most compelling about this argument is the psychological shift it represents. When investors are sitting on trillions of dollars of dry powder, any market pullback is quickly met with buying pressure. This creates a highly effective floor under stock prices. We saw this play out during the recent market dips.
Every time the S&P 500 looked like it was on the verge of a deeper correction, buyers stepped in to support the tape. It is not because they love high valuations, but because they are terrified of missing out on the next leg of the secular bull market. Scott then pressed Tom on whether this liquidity would actually flow into the rest of the market or just continue to pile into the same five tech stocks.
Tom has been a vocal proponent of the idea that the rally will eventually broaden out. He pointed out that we are already starting to see early signs of this in financials and industrials, which have quietly put up strong performances. He believes that as the economy continues to expand, cyclical stocks and small caps will start to catch up with their large cap peers.
This would transform the current tech-led rally into a much healthier, broad-based economic expansion. Where I would offer some caution is on the timing of this breadth. While it is true that a healthy market needs more than five stocks to carry it, the transition can be incredibly volatile. Small cap stocks are highly sensitive to debt refinancing costs, and if interest rates stay higher for longer, those smaller businesses will continue to struggle even if Nvidia and Microsoft keep printing money.
The rotation Tom is talking about is definitely happening, but it is likely to be a grinding, uneven process rather than a smooth upward march. Ultimately, the takeaway from this discussion is that the market's current trajectory is supported by a powerful combination of explosive earnings growth, healthy capital rotation, and unprecedented liquidity.
Nvidia's blockbuster earnings were not the end of the AI trade. They were merely the validation of its first phase. As the capital begins to flow from the hardware layers into the software applications, the opportunities for investors are only going to expand. While geopolitical and regulatory risks will always remain a factor, the structural forces driving this bull market are still very much intact.
The key is to look past the daily volatility and focus on where the capital is actually moving next. The path forward will likely be paved by those who can identify the next sector ready to absorb that excess liquidity. If you are watching the markets, keep your eyes on the industrial and financial names as their performance will be the true indicator of a sustained healthy cycle.
The real test for this bull market is no longer about whether the tech giants can continue to deliver, but whether the rest of the economy has the strength to follow their lead. .
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