A “notable shift” higher in cryptocurrency prices should be good for chip maker Nvidia Corp. , RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves said in a note Friday. A sharp rise for digital currency like ether, Monero, zCash and bitcoin gold in the past three weeks has helped bring down the time gap between mining these currencies and getting paid, Steves contends, which should at least maintain demand for Nvidia graphics processing units miners are using. “For illustrative purposes, when the price of Ethereum was at $300 the payback period was ~9.4 months; today, it is now ~5.6 months–a change we view as material,” Steves wrote. Nvidia, as well as rival Advanced Micro Devices Corp. , have received a boost this year from sales to cryptocurrency miners, who use their GPUs to help create the digital currency. Nvidia shares have more than doubled this year and AMD shares are up 0.2% while the S&P 500 index has gained 16%. RBC has a buy rating and $250 price target on Nvidia stock, which was trading about 0.8% higher Friday.
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
From:: Stock Market News