Nvidia's Insider Sale and a Sub-17 P/ E: Two Windows Into the Same Story
Published on 09/23/2026 at 11:31 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Nvidia shares changed hands at 200.25 euros before the opening bell, sitting roughly 1.1% below a 52-week high of 202.50 euros. That proximity to record territory tells only part of the story. Beneath it, two very different signals are competing for investors' attention: a routine insider transaction and a valuation that has quietly collapsed to levels the stock has not seen in years.
A CFO's Scheduled Exit, Not a Verdict
On September 16, 40,747 shares tied to CFO Colette Kress were withheld to settle obligations on vesting restricted stock units. The following day, Kress disposed of another 34,918 shares worth approximately $7.65 million. The sale ran through a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan she had set up on June 16 — a mechanism designed to execute executive sales automatically, independent of whatever news happens to be moving the stock.
Such arrangements are standard fare at technology companies when equity-based compensation comes due and the associated tax bill is settled directly in shares. Even so, transactions from the executive suite rarely go unnoticed, particularly after a run-up in the share price. Investors watch management's moves for signals, whether or not any are intended.
The Multiple That Keeps Shrinking
Far more consequential than any single insider filing is what has happened to Nvidia's earnings multiple. According to Bloomberg, the price-to-earnings ratio on forward estimates has fallen sharply to below 17. That marks a halving from 2025 levels and sits far beneath the multiple of 50 the stock commanded in 2023.
The market, in other words, has stopped questioning whether demand for AI hardware is real. It is questioning how long the exceptional conditions behind that demand can last. Eli Horton of TCW frames the unease plainly: the compression in the valuation reflects mounting skepticism over whether Nvidia can defend its unprecedented earning power over a period of years. The era when every quarterly report was met with automatic share-price gains is over.
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Management, for its part, has projected a 70% revenue expansion for the following year. That the multiple is nonetheless shrinking toward the range of traditional industrial companies exposes the gap between the company's vision and investors' anxiety.
Margins Face Gravity
The deeper source of distrust lies in profitability. Gross margin reached 75% in the second quarter, but analyst consensus points to a decline below 72% in the fourth quarter. Rising costs for memory chips and advanced manufacturing processes are exacting their toll.
Customers, meanwhile, are not standing still. David Russell of TradeStation notes that heavyweights such as Meta and Alphabet are working intensively on their own semiconductors. Nobody in Silicon Valley wants to remain permanently dependent on a single supplier. Once cloud providers establish in-house processors for training and running models, Nvidia gradually loses its monopoly — and with it, the ability to command astronomical prices.
A Public Spat Over AI Risk
Against that backdrop, CEO Jensen Huang's recent rhetorical offensive looks transparent. On U.S. television, he swept aside warnings about existential AI risks, assigning a zero percent probability to a doomsday scenario by 2030. His thesis: leading software labs exaggerate safety concerns to erect regulatory barriers against new competitors and shield themselves from product liability.
Prominent voices are pushing back. Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton accused Huang bluntly of financial self-interest — anyone selling chips, he argued, has no interest in slowing development. The dispute reveals how jittery the industry has become. When a technology leader must wage regulatory skirmishes to keep the pace high, that does not speak to untrammeled strength.
Huang's own framing of the stock has drawn similar scrutiny. His description of Nvidia as the world's first and only "growth-value stock" at a Goldman Sachs conference sounds less like sovereign confidence than verbal defense.
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Building While the Debate Rages
Operationally, Nvidia is not standing pat. On September 14, the company announced an expansion of its open-source CUDA-Q platform. The new orchestration layer, CUDA-Q Logical, targets applications in fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The company is also preparing to close a multi-billion-dollar acquisition. Roughly three weeks ago, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. The price comprises $11.9 billion for existing shareholders plus a further $1 billion in stock as an employee retention package. Management expects the transaction to close in the first half of 2027.
Whether these strategic steps and platforms will be enough to justify elevated expectations for the future business is now the central question for investors. The re-rating underway does not look like the start of a collapse so much as a long-overdue normalization. Opportunities in the data center business remain intact, and the company should stay highly profitable for the foreseeable future. But the days of effortless gains are likely behind it. What matters from here is not philosophical debate or verbal reassurance — it is the hard reality of margin development and the progress of the competition.
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