Off the charts

Market Scorecard

On Friday, US stocks turned in a decent performance at the end of a difficult week. After Thursday’s rout, we expected more carnage, but New York Fed President John Williams struck a dovish tone in a speech at an event in Chile, boosting hopes of a rate cut at the Fed’s December meeting. Phew.

In company news, Google rose 3.5% to overtake Microsoft as the third-largest company by market cap for the first time since August 2018. Elsewhere, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are rolling out a new employer-focused distribution model for their blockbuster obesity shots, bypassing traditional channels. Finally, Gap closed up 8.2% after it surprised the market with stronger-than-expected sales, thanks to a viral campaign featuring the Katseye remake of the nasty old song "Milkshake".

On Friday, the JSE All-share closed down 2.02%, but the S&P 500 rose 0.98%, and the Nasdaq was 0.88% higher. Ok then.

One Thing, From Paul

Nvidia delivered wonderful quarterly numbers last Thursday. Sales growth accelerated to 62.5% year-on-year, breaking a six-quarter streak of deceleration. It was a stellar performance from the world’s most valuable company.

Nvidia designs semiconductors for data centres, gaming and other applications. It’s the leader in chips for accelerated compute and generative AI, and the servers, switches, networking, AI models and cutting-edge software that runs on their hardware.

CEO Jensen Huang said, "Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out". For reference purposes, Blackwell is Nvidia’s current GPU architecture. These updates come every 2 years, so Blackwell replaced Hopper and the next version will be Rubin, in 2026. After that comes Feynman, in 2028. They have a huge lead over everyone else.

At Nvidia’s size, overcoming supply constraints is a hard job. Huang said, "Growing at this rate and scale, how could anything be easy?" Yet they reiterated committed sales of $500 billion in Blackwell and Rubin chips for calendar 2025 and 2026.

Based on consensus expectations, Nvidia trades for 32 times forward earnings. Most analysts expect earnings growth of 50% per year in the next two years.

Chip demand for datacentres for AI won’t let up anytime soon. The AI industry spent 2025 convinced that pre-training scaling laws had hit a wall because models weren’t improving just from adding more compute during training. Google’s Gemini 3 just blew away that theory. The model has the same parameter count as Gemini 2.5, one trillion parameters, yet it achieved massive performance improvements.

After rising sharply after-hours on the day of the results, Nvidia shares have slipped a little due to unrelated, sloppy market conditions (the Fed and the US interest rate outlook). We have continued to buy Nvidia shares in recent days.

Nvidia is an iconic company, run by an amazing founder, taking advantage of a major technological breakthrough. We are lucky to be able to go along for the ride.

Michael’s Musings

We live in a world where our available choices are growing each day. A decade ago, you were forced to watch whatever was playing on the TV at the time, now you have instant access to thousands of possible streams; from movies, to series, to YouTube videos, to shorts on TikTok. A similar trend is visible in many other areas of life, including shopping, where to holiday, and even who to date.

’The Paradox of Choice’ is a book first published in 2004, which argues that having more choice isn’t always a good thing. Here is what the book says:

"Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well-being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically."

In the years since the book’s publication, follow-up studies have had mixed results in replicating its findings. I know personally, that this is true in some cases. How often do you spend more time looking for something to watch on TV, than actually watching it?

The solution is to get comfortable with not finding the best, but something that is good enough. The small gain between best and ’good enough’ is generally not worth the time and effort of sifting through 100% of the options.

Bright’s Banter

Greek yoghurt brand Chobani has a great origin story. Two decades ago, founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought a defunct yoghurt plant in upstate New York, betting that Americans would embrace thicker, more nutritious Greek yoghurt. He built Chobani around a simple idea that food should be wholesome, high-protein, low-sugar, and still taste amazing.

While many packaged-food giants are battling shrinking volumes, Chobani is ripping in the opposite direction. Retail sales for the year to October 2025 jumped 28.3%, according to NielsenIQ, an eye-popping number in a consumer environment still squeezed by inflation.

"All of our businesses are growing and growing rapidly," said John Frost, Chobani’s chief customer officer. Shifting consumer tastes just happen to be shifting exactly where Chobani has been sitting for 20 years. GLP-1 users report liking the mouthfeel of yoghurt.

US per-capita consumption is still far below Europe’s, Frost sees "a long runway for growth". Chobani’s high-protein Greek yoghurt line is now in 10% of US households, leaving huge upside.

Chobani has grown its share of the $5 billion creamer market from 5.5% to 11.5% in a year, and is responsible for 80% of all category growth. When shoppers splurge, they’re splurging on better-for-you staples. Chobani is simply in the sweet spot.

Signing Off

Asian markets are mostly higher this morning. Australia is leading the gains after BHP officially walked away from its long-running Anglo American takeover bid. In Taiwan, Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn) plans to pour up to $5 billion into expanding its US manufacturing footprint, ramping up capacity to meet surging demand from AI heavyweights Nvidia and OpenAI.

In local company news, Sea Harvest is offloading Ladismith Cheese in an all-cash deal worth up to R850m to Woodlands Dairy. Elsewhere, Cell C is set to list on the JSE at a trimmed R9 billion valuation, with Blu Label settling on an IPO price of R26.50 per share after the bookbuild.

US equity futures are firmly in the green in early trade. The Rand is trading at around R17.38 to the US Dollar.

It’s another week, and we feel optimistic again.

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