Nvidia ’s historic run is minting profits for investors big and small . Many are betting the boom is just beginning.

They are piling into trades that the chipmaker’s shares, which have more than tripled over the past year , are headed still higher. Some have turned to the options market to look for ways to turbocharge their bets on artificial intelligence after a blockbuster earnings report sent the stock up 17% over the past two days.

The exuberance reflects hope that the company is the vanguard of wide adoption of artificial intelligence—and an intense fear of missing out among investors who have sat on the sidelines while the company’s valuation has eclipsed $2 trillion .

With the help of Nvidia, stocks have stormed into 2024 . The S&P 500, which has chalked up fresh records in recent weeks, is up 6.7%. That is the index’s second-best performance for this time period over the past 10 years. The gains were only surpassed by an 11% increase in 2019.

Nvidia has contributed to about a quarter of those gains, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

The Nasdaq, too, is up 6.6% this year and neared a record Friday. The tech-heavy index has been boosted by Nvidia, which this week tacked on $277 billion in additional market value, along with six other tech titans collectively known as the Magnificent Seven.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 3.8% this year and has hit repeated records in recent weeks.

“You look at these numbers and what this company’s done—it’s almost without precedent,” said Mike Ogborne, founder of San Francisco-based hedge fund Ogborne Capital Management,  who counts Nvidia among his top five biggest holdings . “It is nothing short of amazing.”

Ogborne compared AI with the launch of the internet more than two decades ago, which kick-started a technology craze that lasted years.

“It’s exciting,” Ogborne said. “It’s great for America.”

Unfazed by questions about AI

Tamar June in Reno, Nev., is one investor along for Nvidia’s furious stock-market ascent. Since the 1990s, the 61-year-old software-company chief executive has been buying shares of tech firms, including Apple , Microsoft , Cisco, Intel and Oracle . June had been familiar with Nvidia for some time but in recent years kept reading about the chip company in the news. She liked that it was profitable and growing.

June decided to purchase some shares in 2022 at about $260, then watched the stock erase more than half of its value later that year. She held on, knowing that Nvidia’s graphics processing units were in high demand for cloud computing. Then, an AI frenzy hit the stock market in 2023, sending Nvidia’s stock soaring.

Now, Nvidia shares are closing in on $800, and June is looking for opportunities to buy more. She isn’t fazed by worries that the AI boom is bound to come crashing down. June experienced the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis—and watched stocks bounce back to new highs.

“I think it’s still in the beginning stages,” June said of AI developments. “There’s still a lot of headroom for technology because our whole future depends on it.”

$20 billion in options

A herd of investors chased Nvidia while it raced toward its $2 trillion valuation.

At Robinhood Markets , Nvidia was the most purchased stock by customers on a net basis and received the heaviest notional trading volumes over the past month, according to Stephanie Guild, head of investment strategy at the digital brokerage.

The rise drove many traders to pile into the company’s options, a risky corner of the market notorious for boom-and-bust trades.

Nvidia has also morphed into one of the most popular trades in this market, with traders placing more than $20 billion in stock-options bets tied to the company over the past week, according to Cboe Global Markets data. That was more than what they spent on Tesla , Meta Platforms , Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet combined.

Call options, contracts that confer the right to buy shares at a specific price, were particularly popular. And many of the trades appeared to suggest that investors were fearful of missing out on bigger gains to come. Some of the most active trades Friday were calls pegged to the shares jumping to $800 or $850, up from their closing price of $788.17. Betting against the shares has been a losing game , leading many investors to throw in the towel on bearish wagers.

The values of many of these options bets exploded while Nvidia soared, rewarding those who piled in. The big gains also enticed others to join in the trades while the stock’s rally continued.

“There’s a snowball effect,” said Henry Schwartz, a vice president at exchange-operator Cboe Global Markets, of the options activity surrounding Nvidia.

Ahead of the tech behemoth’s earnings report Wednesday, options pegged to the shares jumping to $1,300 —around double where they were trading at the time—were some of the most popular trades.

And for some investors, the 16% one-day jump in Nvidia’s share price Thursday wasn’t enough. They sought even bigger returns and piled into several niche exchange-traded funds that offer magnified exposure to Nvidia stock.

The GraniteShares 2x Long NVDA Daily ETF has taken in almost half a billion dollars from investors on a net basis since launching late in 2022. The fund’s shares have more than doubled in 2024 and have surged nearly 650% since inception.

There have been few signs of profit-taking so far. Investors added a net $263 million to the fund in the past month. The fund’s cousin, which turbocharges bearish bets against Nvidia, has been much less popular.

The euphoria surrounding Nvidia has spread to other stocks, too. Shares of Super Micro Computer , a much smaller company worth less than $50 billion, popped more than 30% Thursday after Nvidia’s earnings report. Traders spent more than $5 billion on options tied to the company, more than what they spent on Tesla this week. Tesla is worth about 13 times as much as the company.

Software that is eating the world

Nvidia’s continued, rapid ascent has stunned even early bulls on semiconductors and generative AI.

Atreides Management founder Gavin Baker, who started covering Nvidia as an analyst at Fidelity in 2000, reminded investors in his Boston hedge fund in an early 2021 letter of Marc Andreessen ’s adage that software was eating the world. “Today, AI is replacing software,” he wrote.

Atreides started buying Nvidia shares in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to regulatory filings.

The wager proved profitable. But as Nvidia shares kept soaring, Baker started selling. Atreides was out of Nvidia by the end of the second quarter of 2023. “This has been a painful mistake,” Baker wrote in a June 2023 letter to his clients, when Nvidia was trading north of $420 a share.

Atreides’s stake in competitor Advanced Micro Devices has helped alleviate the pain from missing out on larger gains. The firm made nearly a quarter billion last year alone on AMD, which it continues to hold along with several other related bets.

Michael Hannosh, a 20-year-old college student in Chicago, said he first purchased shares of Nvidia in August 2022, when the stock traded below $180. Nvidia was one of his first-ever stock purchases. He had built a custom computer for videogaming and used a lot of Nvidia parts.

Hannosh said he kept the shares until last March, then sold them for a roughly 30% profit. He later bought a few more shares at about $230 and sold them over the course of the next several days at a profit.

The shares have tripled since.

“It’s blown my f—ing mind to bits. It’s insane,” said Hannosh. “I really wish I held it, obviously.”

Prices are falling in mainland China. That’s a boon for people living in Hong Kong, but a big problem for the city’s businesses.

Consumer prices in China fell 0.8% in January compared with a year earlier, the country’s biggest deflation reading in more than a decade. That is a sign of the tepid state of the world’s second-largest economy, where a sputtering recovery has knocked confidence and encouraged Beijing to censor some economic research .

Hong Kong residents are increasingly hopping across the border to the city of Shenzhen, where they load up on frozen food and cheap furniture at big-box stores such as Costco and Sam’s Club. Hong Kong business owners, unable to compete with their Chinese counterparts on price, are feeling the squeeze.

“Walking on the streets these days, you’ll feel that Hong Kong retailers are in big trouble,” said the city’s former financial secretary, John Tsang, in a recent social-media post.

The pain being felt by businesses in Hong Kong offers a partial answer to a question that has been debated by economists for much of the past year: How will deflation in China affect the rest of the world?

Chinese export prices have dropped steadily since late 2022 and were 8.4% lower in December than they were a year earlier, according to customs data. Economists think that’s probably a good thing for Europe and the U.S., where central banks have been forced to embark on an aggressive series of interest-rate increases to keep rising prices in check. But the impact on smaller countries could be more troublesome.

China is the biggest trading partner for many countries across the world, and is particularly influential for countries in Asia. The risk for them is that Chinese companies dump their goods overseas in response to weak demand at home. They can also undercut manufacturers in countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, which have slowly been muscling in on China’s status as the world’s factory.

“This Hong Kong story is applicable to countries that are near the neighbourhood of China because the supply chain is much smaller,” said William Lee , chief economist at the Milken Institute, an economic think tank. The shorter supply chain for China’s trade with its neighbours means changes in price pass through more directly, rather than being swallowed up by the various companies that get involved in shipping goods over longer distances.

China’s neighbours in East Asia don’t have the option to impose protectionist policies against it, analysts at Citigroup wrote in a January note. China is simply too big a force in global trade for them to risk its ire.

But if it is hard for China’s neighbours to push back against falling prices, it is even tougher for Hong Kong—which is run by a pro-Beijing government that wants closer integration with the superpower next door.

Hong Kong residents are partly benefiting from the strength of the U.S. dollar. The Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the city’s de facto central bank has copied the Federal Reserve’s series of interest-rate increases over the past two years. China’s central bank has gone in the opposite direction, cutting rates in an attempt to boost the moribund economy.

Since the end of 2021, the Chinese yuan has lost more than 11% of its value against the Hong Kong dollar.

Counting the cost

Hong Kong’s economy grew 3.2% last year, clawing back some lost ground after a 3.7% contraction in 2022. But the numbers mask a host of difficult problems, including an exit of foreign businesses , a prolonged slump in the real-estate sector and the lowest fertility rate in the world .

The apparent embrace of what mainland China had to offer would have appeared unthinkable five years ago, when the city was swept up in antigovernment protests. Back then, shoppers and diners looked up color-coded maps to help them identify businesses that shared their political stance to patronize—and avoided those perceived as having links to mainland China.

But years spent  cooped up in Hong Kong  during the pandemic and penny-pinching by anxious residents have helped boost Shenzhen’s appeal.

“We’re seeing a readjustment of our way of life that suggests economic interdependency between Hong Kong and Shenzhen,” said Edmund Cheng, a political sociology professor at the City University of Hong Kong.

Last year, Hong Kong residents made more than 50 million trips up north following the lifting of all pandemic-related travel restrictions in February, according to Hong Kong Immigration Department data. That’s still below pre pandemic levels, but the Hong Kong residents’ spending power helped boost retail sales in Shenzhen, which rose by 7.8% in 2023, recording one of the biggest jumps at any mainland city last year.

In a survey by a business lobby last year, just 37% of Hong Kong businesses said they expected revenue to grow in 2024. Less than a third thought they were on track to beat pre pandemic levels.

Korsy Lee, 39 years old, is one of many Hong Kong residents who make a regular pilgrimage to Shenzhen—and earns a profit from it. He began shuttling goods back from Shenzhen last August as a side hustle, and now goes there four times a week, loading up his Toyota minivan with frozen hamburgers, fish maw soup, Panasonic dishwashing machines and even toilet-paper rolls. He takes orders from customers and charges a flat fee.

“Eighty percent of my customers are housewives who want to make every penny count,” he said.

Our refrigerators, washing machines and ovens can do more than ever, from producing symmetrical ice cubes to remotely preheating on your commute home. The downside to all these snazzy features is that the appliances are more prone to breaking.

Appliance technicians and others in the industry say there has been an increase in items in need of repair. Yelp users, for example, requested 58% more quotes from thousands of appliance repair businesses last month than they did in January 2022.

Those in the industry blame a push toward computerisation, an increase in the quantity of individual components and flimsier materials for undercutting reliability. They say even higher-end items aren’t as durable.

American households spent 43% more on home appliances in 2023 than they did in 2013, rising from an inflation-adjusted average of $390 to $558, according to Euromonitor International. Prices for the category declined 12% from the beginning of 2013 through the end of 2023, according to the Labor Department.

One reason for the discrepancy between spending and prices is a higher rate of replacement, say consumers, repair technicians and others. That’s left some people wishing they had held on to their clunky ’90s-era appliances and others bargaining with repair workers over intractable ice makers and dryers that run cold.

“We’re making things more complicated, they’re harder to fix and more expensive to fix,” says Aaron Gianni, the founder of do-it-yourself home-repair app Plunjr.

Horror stories

Sharon J. Swan spent nearly $7,000 on a Bosch gas range and smart refrigerator. She thought the appliances would last at least through whenever she decided to sell her Alexandria, Va., home and impress would-be buyers.

That was before the oven caught fire the first time she tried the broiler, leading to a 911 call and hasty return. The ice-maker in the refrigerator, meanwhile, is now broken for the third time in under two years. Bosch covered the first two fridge fixes, but she says she’s on her own for the latest repair, totalling $250, plus parts.

“I feel like I wasted my money,” says the 65-year-old consultant for trade associations.

A Bosch spokeswoman said in an emailed statement that the company has been responsive to Swan’s concerns and will continue to work with her to resolve ongoing issues. “Bosch appliances are designed and manufactured to meet the highest quality standards, and they are built to last,” she said.

Kevin and Kellene Dinino wish they had held on to their white dishwasher from the ’90s that was still working great.

The sleeker $800 GE stainless steel interior dishwasher they purchased sprang a hidden leak within three years, causing more than $35,000 worth of damage to their San Diego kitchen.

Home insurance covered the claim, which included replacing the hardwood down to the subfloor and all their bottom cabinetry, but kicked the Dininos off their policy. The family also went without access to their kitchen for months.

“This was a $60 pump that was broken. What the hell happened?” says Kevin, 45, who runs a financial public-relations firm.

A GE Appliances spokeswoman said the company takes appliance issues seriously and works quickly to resolve them with consumers.

Increased complexity

Peel back the plastic on a modern refrigerator or washing machine and you’ll see a smattering of sensors and switches that its 10-year-old counterpart lacks. These extra components help ensure the appliance is using only the energy and water it needs for the job at hand, technicians say. With more parts, however, more tends to go wrong more quickly, they say.

Mansoor Soomro, a professor at Teesside University, a technical college in Middlesbrough, England, says home appliances are breaking down more often. He says that manufacturers used to rely mostly on straightforward mechanical parts (think an on/off switch that triggers a single lever). In the past decade or so, they’ve transitioned to relying more on sophisticated electrical and computerised parts (say, a touch screen that displays a dozen different sensor-controlled wash options).

When a complicated machine fails, technicians say they have a much harder time figuring out what went wrong. Even if the technician does diagnose the problem, consumers are often left with repairs that exceed half the cost of replacement, rendering the machine totalled.

“In the majority of cases, I would say buying a new one makes more economic sense than repairing it,” says Soomro, who spent seven years working at Siemens , including in the home-appliances division.

These machines are also now more likely to be made with plastic and aluminium rather than steel, Soomro says. High-efficiency motors and compressors, too, are likely to be lighter-duty, since they’re tasked with drawing less energy .

A spokeswoman for the Association for Home Appliance Manufacturers says the industry has “enhanced the safety, energy efficiency, capacity and performance of appliances while adding features and maintaining affordability and durability for purchasers.” She says data last updated in 2019 shows that the average life of an appliance has “not substantially shifted over the past two decades.”

When simpler is better

Kathryn Ryan and Kevin Sullivan needed a new sensor to fix their recently purchased $1,566 GE Unitized Spacemaker washer-dryer. GE wasn’t able to fix the sensor for months, so the couple paid a local technician $300 to get the machine working.

The repairman also offered them a suggestion: Avoid the sensor option and stick to timed dries.

“You should be able to use whatever function you please on a brand new appliance, ideally,” says Sullivan, a 32-year-old musician in Burbank, Calif.

More features might seem glamorous, Frontdoor virtual appliance tech Jim Zaccone says, but fewer is usually better.

“Consumers are wising up to the failures that are happening and going, ‘Do I really need my oven to preheat while I’m at the grocery store?’” jokes Zaccone, who has been in the appliance-repair business for 21 years.

He just replaced his own dishwasher and says he bought one with “the least bells and whistles.” He also opted for a mass-market brand with cheap and readily available parts. Most surprisingly, he chose a bottom-of-the-line model.

“Spending a lot of money on something doesn’t guarantee you more reliability,” says Zaccone.