저자: IvanaDelevska · 외국인
요약 보기
CES 앞두고 엔비디아 실적 상향 여력 강조. 블랙웰 출하 우려는 과장됐고 2025년 2000억달러 매출 가능, 추론에서 지속 학습으로 수요 확대. 엔비디아 주가 연 30%대 복리 상승 가능. AMD는 커스텀칩 경쟁 속 상대적 열세지만 시장 공간은 충분.
다듬은 글
Stocks are off to a good start this morning, and Nvidia is playing a fairly big role in supporting the market after bouncing on Friday and continuing that move this morning. Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, where Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, will speak tonight, we're looking at the options market for Nvidia with Ivana Delevska, founder and CIO of Sphere Invest and a noted semiconductor bull. Happy New Year, Ivana. Good to see you.
Happy New Year, Oliver.
Nvidia's stock stalled a bit going into the end of last year, and people were very concerned about two things. One is competition from custom chips, and the other is execution on Blackwell deliveries. We expect to hear more details on both. On custom-chip competition, I think people miss two key points. CUDA is a real advantage for them, so I think they'll talk a lot about that and introduce new frameworks and models that people can use to build applications. On Blackwell, we think it is really on track. We think the concerns were overblown going into last year, so any indication that it's going well will be a positive catalyst for the stock.
Do you expect updated numbers, or is this mostly product and innovation talk?
These events are mostly product and innovation talk rather than numbers. But you can easily infer that if things are on track, their guidance becomes achievable. People have some concerns about Nvidia being able to deliver billions of dollars of Blackwell, so any commentary indicating the numbers are still on track would be positive.
Just to come back to Blackwell: it now seems to be an assessment of how many buyers show up and how ready the machines are to be bought, a basic supply and demand question. Because we already know the product, what might surprise, either in the applications and software they're offering or from the consumer standpoint, and what will people be buzzing about?
The thing people don't appreciate is how model training is changing over time. Everybody is asking where the next leg of demand will come from, and this is really where we see a lot of it coming from. Models are going to be trained very differently than they are today. It's going to be more of an iterative process, and it requires significantly more compute. Any detail on that, which drives exponential growth for accelerated computing, will be very valuable to get from this conference. In the past we trained models and then did inference. In the future we'll be doing more of a continuous process of constantly training and improving models.
Jensen has called demand insane for Blackwell, which sets the bar pretty high, and the stock is moving close to its record. Given the price action, what is your baseline right now? Where could Nvidia get to this year, and what path does it take?
We are expecting pretty significant upside to the numbers. We think they can deliver $200 billion from Blackwell alone. If you do the math, even assuming a constant multiple and that they can keep growing, you can see this stock compounding at 30-plus percent over the next several years. So we still see solid upside. At some point the upside won't be exponential, but it will be more of a compounding type of upside, and that's what we expect this year.
Taiwan Semi and Hon Hai news was good overnight for the narrative. Hon Hai looked pretty active, so Nvidia's partners are jamming. That's a good sign, right?
That's right, a very good sign for the space overall.
Tom, let's talk options for Nvidia for a moment. How wild is the options market? This isn't an earnings report, but when Jensen takes the stage at a big event, I'd imagine implied volatility creeps up.
Implied volatility is creeping up only slightly. It's still relatively low, with IV percentile rank around 25%, so it's in the bottom quarter of implied volatility levels we've seen over the last 52 weeks. Last year CES was on January 8, and the stock rallied 6% after the first keynote. Expectations are pretty high, and option flow on the upside is expanding, with out-of-the-money calls growing as we speak. The put-call ratio is very low because everybody is piling into speculative calls. So there's upside here.
I looked at it this way: if you think it's going to go up, you take a bullish stance and buy some calls, but you offset some of the cost because the stock has rallied significantly over the last few sessions. Going out to the January 31 weekly cycle, 25 days to expiration, I'm buying the 148 strike call, which is slightly in the money with a higher delta. Against it, I sold the 160 call to offset some of the risk and cost. It's a $12-wide bullish call vertical paying roughly a $45 debit, so the risk is about $450. The spread can expand to $12 if it gets above 160. You have flexibility in trade management because you're buying a directional bullish vertical. If the stock pops to 155 or 156 tomorrow, this could expand to maybe $8, which gives you the opportunity to trim some of the position, or close it all. You don't have to wait until expiration if you get the move sooner.
If we get past the high, your gains will get capped, but that's a logical approach given the chop this stock has been in. Until it breaks out, it might well stay range-bound. A rejection would be pretty harsh if it gets up to 150 and turns around. I like the direction. You only need about a 2% move from current prices to get above the break-even of roughly 152.5.
When it comes to the other stuff, is there room in 2025 for second-tier chip trades to take a stand, or have we learned the numbers are just too powerful for Nvidia to let second-tier players in?
AMD was pretty rough in the second half of last year, and the charts of a bunch of chipmakers look totally different now. The downside for AMD last year actually came more from the custom chipmakers. I think there's room for several players, but it's very difficult to compete with Nvidia, and the custom chipmakers have made slightly more progress than AMD last year. We're watching this very closely. Microsoft and Amazon are partnering with companies like Nvidia, Marvell, and Broadcom to develop their own chips, so AMD is having a rougher go. But the market is pretty large, and there will be space for multiple players. It just will take a bit longer for somebody like AMD to gain traction.
Thanks a lot, Ivana. Great to get your take, as always. Thanks for being here, and we look forward to continuing the conversation throughout 2025. Ivana Delevska of Sphere Invest.
Tom, what do the AMD options look like?
Implied volatility has rebounded a little. The stock was down 18% last year, but it has bounced over the last few sessions along with Nvidia and the tech trade generally. I looked at a bullish trade if you think it rebounds further, while offsetting some of the cost. Instead of buying a straight call or a call vertical as in the Nvidia example, I'm buying an unbalanced call butterfly to the upside. My risk is only what I pay, and it's lower because of the butterfly structure. Going out to the January 31 weekly cycle, 25 days to expiration, you'll capture earnings on the 28th, so keep that event risk in mind. I'm buying one 130 strike call, slightly out of the money, selling two 140 strike calls, and buying one 145 strike call. In essence, you're buying a 131-40 call vertical, which is bullish, and offsetting some of the cost by selling the 141-45 position. The apex of profitability is at or near the 140 strike. The debit is $2.40, which is your risk, with a break-even around 132.40 to the upside. That's only about 2% above the current share price, so you don't need a monster move. Even above 145, profitability more than doubles. But you do want it to grind higher toward the 140 strike over the next three and a half weeks.
So more of a slow grind than the Nvidia trade, which capitalizes on a quicker pop.
Fair enough. AMD is joining in this morning, up 3.5%. Thanks again to Ivana Delevska of Sphere Invest, and thanks, Tom White, for the look at the options trades.
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