Prominent fund manager cuts his Nvidia stake

Seasoned tech investor Paul Wick of Seligman Investments has been reducing his holdings in  Nvidia Corp  . (NASDAQ:NVDA) recently, voicing doubts about the company’s future earnings growth, Bloomberg News reported.

“Our enthusiasm has moderated somewhat over the last one to two weeks,” Wick said during a video call at a UBS Group's event in Singapore on Friday, without specifying the extent of the stake cut.

Wick, a veteran technology investor of nearly three decades, compared Nvidia’s current situation to Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) during the dot-com bubble.

Wick pointed out that Nvidia derives about 60% to 70% of its revenue from its 10 largest customers, making it “inherently a much riskier company than Microsoft or Google who have very low customer concentration and thousands upon thousands of customers.”

Nvidia briefly held the title of the world’s most valuable company this week, with its shares tripling over the past year due to AI optimism. Despite this, many investors, including Wick and Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates, remain skeptical about the rally’s sustainability.

Nvidia trades at 43 times its projected earnings for the next year, a valuation higher than all but one of its peers in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index.

Wick, who manages the $13.5 billion Columbia Seligman Technology & Information Fund, also mentioned that generative AI companies, which have invested billions in Nvidia systems, show low returns on invested capital.

He noted that “many of Nvidia’s largest customers are aggressively designing their own processors,” such as Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google,  Microsoft Corp  (NASDAQ:MSFT)., and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META).

For now, Nvidia remains one of the top holdings in Wick’s fund, which has outperformed 97% of its peers over the past three years, according to Bloomberg data.