Nvidia Stock Hasn't Set a Record in 4 Months. History Says These Stalls Have Ended 2 Ways.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) hasn't closed at a record high since May 14, when the stock finished at $235.74. That was 87 trading days ago, about four months. Shares now sit near $215 as of this writing, about 9% below that mark.

Droughts like this aren't new for the artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant, though. Since reclaiming its 2007 peak in 2016, Nvidia's stock has gone 60 or more trading days without a record close seven times.

Five of those stretches ended at new highs within about six months. The other two turned into bear markets that cut the stock by more than half.

Image source: Nvidia.

Seven droughts, two endings

Four of the seven droughts lasted at least as long as the current one has. Two of them ended with the stock at fresh records: a 115-day stretch that ended in June 2025 and a 120-day stretch that ended this past April.

The other two kept going -- and the stock took a beating both times. After peaking in October 2018, Nvidia went 344 trading days without another record close, falling 56% along the way before finally recovering in February 2020. The stretch that began in November 2021 ran 373 trading days, with the stock down 66% at the low, before a new record arrived in May 2023.

In other words, the record has no middle ground. Every drought that resolved quickly was over within about 120 trading days, and the only two that ran longer became bear markets. Today's stall would pass the 120-day mark in early November.

What separated them?

The difference, I'd argue, showed up in Nvidia's revenue, not on its price chart.

The 2018 drought began as the fallout from a cryptocurrency bust reached Nvidia's results. Demand from miners had collapsed, and unsold inventory piled up at the distributors and card makers that sell its products.

"Our near-term results reflect excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom, which will be corrected," CEO Jensen Huang said in Nvidia's November 2018 earnings release.

But the slump didn't stop at the channel. In late January 2019, Nvidia cut its quarterly revenue guidance to $2.20 billion from $2.70 billion, blaming weak demand for gaming chips in China, among other problems. And sales for the full fiscal year that followed fell 7% to $10.92 billion.

The 2021 drought had the same shape. Gaming revenue fell 27% in fiscal 2023 (a year that ended in late January 2023), and Nvidia's total revenue came in flat at $27.0 billion, with sales in the fiscal fourth quarter down 21% from a year earlier.

Sales kept climbing straight through the quick droughts. The most recent stall, which started in late October 2025, was more than halfway done when Nvidia reported quarterly revenue up 73% year over year in late February. Two months later, the stock was back at a record.

Sales are still accelerating

Capturing how different today's backdrop is, Nvidia grew revenue 106% year over year in the second quarter of fiscal 2027 (a period that ended July 26), reaching $96.2 billion. Data center revenue climbed 117% to $89.0 billion. And net income more than doubled, rising 126% year over year to $59.7 billion. Growth is speeding up, too. The company's year-over-year revenue growth rate has now accelerated for four straight quarters, moving from 62% last fall to 73%, then 85%, and now 106%.

And management expects the growth to continue. On Nvidia's late-August earnings call, chief financial officer Colette Kress told analysts the company expects revenue to grow about 70% in fiscal 2028. She called that a supply constrained outlook, meaning the ceiling is how many chips the company can produce.

The price, against numbers like those, doesn't look demanding. Shares cost about 27 times earnings -- and about 14 times expected fiscal 2028 earnings, a price that seems to assume the big growth mostly ends after next year.

Which ending should investors expect this time? Both of Nvidia's long, painful droughts overlapped falling sales.

With revenue accelerating and next fiscal year's ceiling set by supply, today, I think, looks a lot more like the stalls the stock grew its way out of. The stock, in my opinion, remains a buy at this level.

Of course, neither bust was forecast ahead of time. Nvidia set its October 2018 record just weeks before the crypto warning, and the gaming slump followed within months of the November 2021 peak. Demand for AI computing could turn just as fast. But that turn would show up where the last two did -- in the company's reported sales. And a four-month wait for a record isn't evidence of it.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.