Nvidia’s selloff hit a retirement portfolio hard this week, but not hard enough to erase the gain. The 64-year-old retiree who bought 1,000 shares on June 10, 2024, saw the position slide to $186,640 on Friday after Nvidia fell 9.26% Thursday and then rebounded 2.78% the next day.
The move came as chip stocks suffered their worst day since March 2020, and the stock that had closed at a record $239.24 on Oct. 6 finished the week 8.8% lower at $186.64. That left Nvidia about 22% below its peak, a sharp reversal for a name that had been one of the market’s clearest winners.
The retiree paid $121.79 a share for the stock, or $121,790 in all. Even after the week’s slide, that stake was still worth $64,850 more than the original purchase price, a 53.2% gain. But it had also given back $52,600 from the October high, which is the kind of swing that gets attention when the position is sitting inside a retirement account.
That account was not built on Nvidia alone. The investor also had $600,000 in other retirement savings and received $2,500 a month from Social Security, but Nvidia still made up 23.7% of a $786,640 portfolio. One reason Jim Cramer Nvidia Stock Advice keeps circulating is that the stock has become a proxy for whether investors should stay aggressive or trim a winner that has grown too large.
There is a practical way to think about the decision. Selling 300 shares would reduce Nvidia’s share of the portfolio to 16.6% and would raise about $2,918 in federal tax, based on the figures provided. It would also lock in part of the gain while leaving the retiree with 700 shares and a position that still dwarfs most single-stock holdings.
The week’s drop was especially jarring because Thursday alone erased $18,530 from the value of the 1,000-share stake, before Friday’s bounce returned $5,040 of that loss. Nvidia’s quarterly dividend was also raised to 25 cents a share this year from 1 cent, which would mean about $1,000 a year on 1,000 shares and a yield of 0.54% at Friday’s price, but that income stream is small compared with the size of the price moves.
The broader market backdrop mattered too. Investors were weighing what the new Congress could mean for data center construction, and the sell-off hit almost every chip name at once. Nvidia sells into demand that exists today, while the weakest chip stocks were tied more closely to equipment and memory spending that depends on next year’s plans.
Whether the retiree sells any shares now is the open question. The math makes a trim easy to justify, but the gain still in hand makes patience just as defensible, and after a week like this, that is usually the real choice investors face.
