The world today was engineered to be ephemeral and noisy. This is a terrible combination for an investor. On Twitter alone, 456,000 messages are sent every minute. On Facebook, 510,000 comments are posted every minute, and 293,000 status updates are made. Outside of social media, 16 million text messages are sent every minute, and 156 million emails are sent.
For an investor, the antidote to noise is quality stock analysis. Due diligence requires dozens of hours per company, and it takes hundreds of hours every year to produce a free newsletter with quality analysis. I/O Fund strives to offer some of the team’s best analysis for free, and we believe the consistency and depth of what we provide for free is hard to replicate.
We offer this in the most challenging sector for investors, which is, hands-down, the tech sector. The tech sector is unusually challenging because it involves many different verticals – artificial intelligence, crypto, consumer, media, fintech, ad-tech, semis, cloud, and more. It’s also the highest risk and highest reward sector in the market. Due to sudden price movements in both directions, the stakes are high. Perhaps we are biased, but quality analysis can be hard, particularly in the tech sector.
Below, we present you with 10 Timeless Articles You Won’t Want to Miss.
1) Nvidia’s Cuda Moat and Early-AI Thesis from 2018, for Gains of Over 4,160% on Premium Site
Our firm’s AI coverage on Nvidia began with calling Nvidia an AI leader seven years ago! Yes, really.
In the article published in November 2018 when Nvidia was trading at $4.93; Holding Nvidia Stock Will Pay Off Due to Two Impenetrable Moats, Beth said that “Economic indicators and earnings from tech companies have not exactly warranted this reaction from the market… Nvidia’s outlook is quite the opposite in regards to public-company growth trajectory. The market may continue to have volatility, but Nvidia investors who are patient will be rewarded due to competitive advantages in GPU-powered cloud performance and developer adoption of Nvidia’s platform.”
Since the free article was published, the stock is up by over 2,600% and our first entry on our premium site is up by over 4,160%* with an entry at $3.15. The stock has now become the Street’s most-followed AI stock.
Nvidia has firmly established itself as the GPU leader in this AI boom, with CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) serving as its primary moat. The A100 and H100 drove the revenue but CUDA’s software moat is why Nvidia has a near-monopoly in the GPU-driven data center with a 98% market share. Ultimately, CUDA is the primary reason that Nvidia is challenging to disrupt, and Beth pointed this would help the company dominate AI development 7 years ago. She then repeated this thesis 25 times before the Street finally caught on in May of 2023.
CUDA is a moat because developers are trained to program GPUs on this platform specifically. For a competitor to take market share, developers would have to be motivated to install new drivers, compilers, and to learn new libraries and tools to switch from CUDA to a new, competing programming platform.
Beth rightly pointed out that Nvidia has established itself as the dominant development platform for AI, a fact that later became increasingly apparent as AI technology matures. In 2018, the Street grew concerned that custom silicon would replace Nvidia’s GPUs, yet Beth pointed out that developers favor Nvidia’s GPUs for their ease of use and flexibility compared to custom silicon.
Here is what she stated in this prescient analysis:
“Nvidia is already the universal platform for development, but this won’t become obvious until innovation in artificial intelligence matures. Developers are programming the future of artificial intelligence applications on Nvidia because GPUs are easier and more flexible than customized TPU chips from Google or FGPA chips used by Microsoft. Meanwhile, Intel’s CPU chips will struggle to compete as artificial intelligence applications and machine learning inferencing move to the cloud.”
*Note: Stock gains listed are through Dec 31, 2024 and are updated annually.
2) Nvidia to Surpass Apple’s Valuation from 2021, to Become World’s Most Valuable Company
Beth is known as the Queen of Nvidia, not only for predicting Nvidia would become a dominant AI stock when it was priced below $5, but she clearly set herself apart again in 2021 with a prediction that Nvidia would surpass Apple to become the world’s most valuable company when it was priced at $152.51.
At the time, this prediction was inconceivable as it would require not only Nvidia to go up more than 350%, but also for the tech leader Apple to plateau. Ultimately, Nvidia went up more than 500% since that call, and is up 900% between Jan 1st 2023 and Jan 1st 2025 while Apple is up 70% in that two-year time frame.
The I/O Fund took it a step further and bought on the October 13th, 2022 low with a real-time trade alert sent to premium members to buy at $18.51 (corrected to account for stock split). This single buy alert is up an impressive +700%, if held into today’s price . Overall, premium members received nine real-time buy alerts below $20 in 2021 and 2022; learn more about premium here. Notably, this prediction required holding a high conviction through a 60% selloff in 2022.
The 2021 prediction that Nvidia would surpass Apple’s valuation within 5 five years highlighted Nvidia’s niche in the AI economy and also that Nvidia is not standing still with Ampere Architecture. Beth noted, “Nvidia has a market cap of roughly $550 billion compared to Apple’s nearly $2.5 trillion. We believe Nvidia can surpass Apple by capitalizing on the artificial intelligence economy, which will add an estimated $15 trillion to GDP. This is compared to the mobile economy that brought us the majority of the gains in Apple, Google and Facebook, and contributes $4.4 trillion to GDP. For comparison purposes, AI contributes $2 trillion to GDP as of 2018.”
3) In 2024, Beth Followed Up on Why Nvidia Was Still a Buy
To date, Beth has updated her Nvidia thesis thirty times with original insights. In February of 2024, she explained why Nvidia was still a strong Buy, and how Nvidia would surpass Apple two years earlier than her original 5-year prediction in 2021.
In the analysis, Nvidia Stock Gained $1.5 Trillion To Surpass The FAANGs – Apple Is Next she pointed out that it was not just the consistency and magnitude of Nvidia’s multi-billion-dollar revenue beats, but the expansion of its margins and earnings as revenue grew >200% for multiple quarters as it approached a $90 billion annualized scale. She also highlighted the accelerated product roadmap, which is another reason for the company’s stellar returns and futuristic software opportunities.
4) Prediction: Nvidia Bottomed in Late 2022
When the market dumped Nvidia stock, with the price cratering 60% in 2022, Beth aptly pointed to the big picture, i.e., the H100 chip opportunity for readers in her September 2022 analysis, Nvidia Stock Is Ready To Rumble With RTX 40 Series And H100 GPUs, during a time when the mainstream media was focusing on an irrelevant crypto mining miss.
Here is what she said at the height of the selloff:
“Nvidia had a big week with GTC 2022 and management is clearly ready to rumble against any excess inventory from crypto mining. The negative catalyst from crypto mining and Nvidia’s price action is eerily similar to Q4 2018/Q1 2019 —- yet the company is not the same company it was four years ago. This is apparent by Nvidia flexing some major product muscle by timing it’s best-ever gaming release and it’s best-ever AI chip to hit the market in October.”
Beth further highlighted that the Hopper architecture represents a significant performance leap over the Ampere architecture. Some of the improvements include Enhanced Algorithm Processing, increased bandwidth and scalability, memory, and performance boost, which all played a key role in capturing the AI demand. For example:
- NVLink allows connecting eight H100s into a single, powerful GPU with immense processing power and memory bandwidth.
- 50% more memory and interface bandwidth than the A100, with support for 80GB of HBM3 memory.
- Approximately 3x overall performance increase over the A100, and up to 6x faster in specific workloads.
“Where the H100 really stands apart is the leap in performance with about 3X more performance than the A100 and the H100 is up to 6X faster. The A100 lacked support for FP8 compute at default whereas the H100 will leverage a transformer engine to switch between FP8 and FP16, depending on the workload.”
5) Early Bitcoin Bulls when Bitcoin was trading at $11,156
I/O Fund published the Bitcoin bull thesis to its readers in July 2019; Will Bitcoin Make a Good Investment? Part 1: Institutional Adoption. Beth rightly said “There are key reasons as to why bitcoin will make a solid long-term asset over the next five years and may reach its peak as a new technology with mass adoption in seven to ten years. This 3-part series explores why strategically entering the bitcoin market at a good entry price will make a solid investment for the future.”
The first being institutional adoption, then economic uncertainty, and mobile payments. Since the article was published the shares have risen by over 730% and our first entry, Bitcoin is up by over 1,100%. Interesting enough, it was institutional adoption that became the major catalyst despite famed investor Warren Buffet stating Bitcoin was “probably rat poison squared” around the same time she wrote smart money would become the major, primary catalyst.
I/O Fund Called the 2021 Top in Bitcoin and the 2022 Bottom
I/O Fund Portfolio Manager, Knox Ridley, accurately called the top in June 2021. The uptrend in Bitcoin that continued through April and May topped at $64,895, which was the lower end of the listed range. Our firm took heavy gains by cutting the position in half, as outlined in the video and article: “Why the I/O Fund Cut Bitcoin in Half.”
Nearly 18 months later, in December 2022, Knox provided another prescient update that Bitcoin was bottoming and would rally again when the price was bottoming in the $17,000 range. In the article “Bitcoin is Going to Rally: What You Need to Know” he stated:
“Yet, there is key evidence that shows how Bitcoin is stronger today than it was during the previous three drawdowns. The reason you don’t want to ignore this is because – despite steep +80% selloffs — Bitcoin has reclaimed new highs within 3.5 years, every time. Therefore, it’s not only the size of gains Bitcoin has provided which places it as the #1 asset of all-time yet it’s the speed in which this is accomplished that is also remarkable.”
A year later when Bitcoin was trading at $43,600 Knox provided yet another update stating that Bitcoin price will reach $100,000 due to institutional adoption.
