The Daily Chase: Nvidia earnings will tell us how much room AI bull has to run

Here are five things you need to know this morning.

Nvidia earnings in the spotlight: Given its ubiquity today, it might feel like artificial intelligence has been dominating the discourse for a while, but you could make a pretty decent argument that the AI frenzy underway in stock markets at the moment actually started almost exactly one year ago today. Granted, ChatGPT was already on the scene and giving consumers a glimpse of their AI-powered futures, but May 24, 2023 was when the money side of things came into full view, as chipmaker Nvidia posted quarterly results that obliterated market expectations and set the bar for what to expect from AI-related companies moving forward. At the time, CEO Jensen Huang told investors that the company was seeing unprecedented demand for its products because of AI applications, and the optimism sent the shares up 25 per cent in a single day to just shy of US$400 apiece. While the stock had already quietly doubled since the start of the year, it continued to do so more loudly from that point on, setting lofty expectations and then beating them handily time and time again. There’s little reason to expect anything different this time around, and the market will be awaiting the company’s latest eye-popping numbers after the close today. As things stand, with the stock changing hands at $953 per share, Nvidia is the third most valuable company in the U.S. with a market cap of just over $2.3 trillion, trailing only Microsoft and Apple. Of the three, Nvidia has the smallest net income and trades at the highest multiple, but given where we are in the business cycle and era of AI, Nvidia seems to have the biggest growth potential from here on out. The numbers are set to come out at 4 p.m. eastern time, but we’ll have extensive coverage of the company both before and after that.

CPP posts 8% return: Sure, inflation continues to eat away at purchasing power and wages don’t seem to be increasing enough to offset it, but look on the bright side, Canadian employees: your national pension plan keeps getting bigger. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board says its assets grew by eight per cent to just over $632 billion in its recently-completed fiscal year. That’s a $62 billion bump and good news for the more than 20 million Canadian workers and retirees who already depend on the fund for retirement income, or one day will. The CPP said a strong performance in public and private equities led the way performance-wise, while investments in credit infrastructure and energy also boosted the bottom line. “This was offset by overall weaker performance of emerging markets compared to developed markets and lower performance of real estate assets,” the fund said in a release. A dive into the numbers gives some interesting context for the current ongoing debate about whether or not big Canadian pension funds should be investing more in Canada, too. By region over the past five years, CPP’s Canadian investments posted a 4.2 per cent return. That’s below the performance seen in every other geographic region, save Europe, and less than half the 8.9 per cent return clocked in the fund’s U.S.-based assets. Call it another win for diversification. We’ll speak with CPP CEO John Graham about the fund’s latest results on The Open this morning, so stay tuned for that.

London Drugs refuses to pay $25M cyber ransom: Retailer London Drugs said the cyberattack on its network of stores last month was orchestrated by a sophisticated group of global cybercriminals who are demanding a ransom of $25 million — a sum the pharmacy chain has no ability or intention of paying. The company announced this morning that the criminal group behind the theft is threatening to release the data it stole on the dark web. While the chain says it doesn’t believe that patient, customer or “primary employee” data was compromised, other sensitive information was absconded with. “We acknowledge these criminals may leak stolen London Drugs corporate files, some of which may contain employee information on the Dark Web,” London Drugs told CTV News in a statement. The company says it notified all current employees of the potential breach and offered 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft services, regardless of whether or not any of their data was ultimately stolen.