Wall Street Legend Buys AI Stock (Not NVDA)
Posted December 02, 2024
Davis Wilson
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Stanley Druckenmiller is a Wall Street legend.
He is the former chairman and president of Duquesne Capital Management, which he founded in 1981 and closed in 2010 when it had more than $12 billion in assets.
He now just invests his personal assets, which Google tells me is just shy of $7 billion.
Druckenmiller caused a bit of a stir not too long ago when he revealed that he sold his personal position in AI chip juggernaut Nvidia (NVDA).
Druckenmiller, who admitted that he didn’t know how to spell Nvidia, bought shares in the fourth quarter of 2022 at the urging of his partner.
He had picked up the stock just one month before OpenAI released AI chatbot ChatGPT.
He said, “Even an old guy like me could figure out what that meant, so I increased the position substantially.”
However, in late March of this year, he sold his Nvidia position, saying he needed a break.
Unfortunately for him, the stock is up over 50% since then.
"I’ve made so many mistakes in my investment career," he told Bloomberg last month. "One of them was that I sold all my Nvidia (shares)... I own none… It was a big mistake in terms of AI."
I mention Druckenmiller because he just bought a different AI-related stock: Broadcom (AVGO).
While NVIDIA delivers the processing power and AI-specific tools, Broadcom provides the infrastructure backbone powering today’s AI buildout. Together, they address different, yet complementary, aspects of the AI ecosystem.
I was a bit surprised to hear Druckenmiller bought Broadcom over re-buying Nvidia.
In fact, I downright disagree with his premise that AVGO is a better buy then NVDA.
Check out these statistics from the two stocks.
Broadcom is more than twice as expensive as Nvidia (measured by P/E ratio).
Broadcom is half as profitable as Nvidia (measured by Operating Margin).
And Broadcom has a fraction of the expected growth this year and next as Nvidia.
Note: this chart doesn’t even show the qualitative factors benefitting Nvidia as well – things like superior products, moat, and a massive backlog of demand.
Yet Stanley Druckenmiller, an investing legend, just decided to buy AVGO over NVDA.
Sorry, Stanley. I have to firmly disagree here.
To me, this is like going to the grocery store and spending more money on an inferior product.
When choosing stocks for The Million Mission, valuation and growth are the two most important factors I consider.
That’s because stocks trading at lower valuations have less downside risk. And the businesses of stocks with higher growth potential are less likely to be impacted by external events that can sink stocks in the short-term.
To me, Nvidia is at the top of the high-quality list. Broadcom is not.
During his Bloomberg interview, Druckenmiller went on to say, "I think Nvidia is a wonderful company and were the price to come down we would get involved again, but right now I'm licking my wounds from a bad sale there.”
Unfortunately, it seems like he’s digging those wounds a bit deeper with his recent purchase of Broadcom over Nvidia.
Here at The Million Mission, we’re sticking with NVDA.