A forward price-to-earnings multiple of 10 is the foundation of Tom Lee’s case for buying Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) shares following the departure of founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
Lee, who heads research at Fundstrat, made the call on social media platform X as the chipmaker’s stock closed Thursday down roughly 4% at approximately $166.10, having recovered from an intraday collapse of as much as 14%.
The stock has now shed 11% since the start of the year, leaving investors weighing whether the selloff represents a durable entry point or the beginning of a more prolonged correction.
“There will be pain near term since many investors view this as an adverse development. It is. But at 10x forward PE, this is also the best risk/reward in AI at the moment,” Lee wrote.
Lee acknowledged that any founder’s exit is a defining moment for a company, writing that “the departure of the founder and CEO is a massive test for any company.”
Despite that concession, he argued that Nvidia’s structural advantages, including its chip-design lead, control over its supply chain, and the entrenched CUDA software ecosystem, would outlast the leadership transition.
He also pointed to the depth of Nvidia’s engineering organization and its capacity to deploy free cash flow toward share buybacks as reasons the company could sustain its competitive position.
Lee added that employee ownership aligns internal incentives with shareholders, claiming without citing a source that 80% of Nvidia staff qualify as stock millionaires and that half hold equity worth more than $25 million.
The bullish Nvidia call arrived against a turbulent macro backdrop, with Bitcoin plunging roughly 7% in 24 hours to $68,408 by early Friday morning, its weakest level since August 20, while Ether fell 6% to $1,921.
The crypto slide wiped out $1.47 billion in leveraged positions, with $1.31 billion of that representing forced exits from bullish bets, compounding pressure across risk assets broadly.
Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $1.44 billion in net outflows across five sessions between November 5 and November 11, with BlackRock’s IBIT responsible for approximately $1.07 billion of that total, according to data from Farside Investors.
A surging dollar added further strain, with the Dollar Index reaching a 19-month high after October consumer prices rose 0.4% on a monthly basis and core inflation climbed 0.3%, keeping additional Federal Reserve rate action in view.
Index provider MSCI separately flagged Strategy and Metaplanet for removal from its benchmarks after the November 30 close, a move that could prompt mechanical selling by funds tracking those indexes.
Lee, who chairs Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), has maintained a parallel conviction in Ethereum even as prices falter, saying that weakness in the token reflects “the impatience of markets” rather than any deterioration in fundamentals.
Bitmine disclosed it purchased 9,587 ETH during the prior week, lifting its total holdings to 6.07 million tokens as of November 8, a position representing 4.97% of Ethereum’s entire circulating supply and just below the firm’s stated 5% target.
Lee framed his longer-term crypto outlook around a 24-to-36-month horizon, citing accelerating tokenization activity concentrated on the Ethereum network as the primary catalyst.
On Stocktwits, retail traders appeared to side with Lee on Nvidia, pushing sentiment to “extremely bullish” on “extremely high” message volume, while Bitcoin drew only a “neutral” reading on comparatively thin traffic.
Bitcoin has declined 19% year-to-date, a steeper loss than Nvidia’s 11% pullback, underscoring the breadth of the current retreat from high-risk growth assets across both equity and digital markets.
