I understand why investors look at Nvidia and see something close to inevitability. The company has become the tollbooth, hardware store, power plant, and unofficial patron saint of the artificial-intelligence boom. Every major technology company seems to be building data centers with the urgency of someone who has just learned the future will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Nvidia supplies the chips, systems, networking, and software ecosystem that make much of this construction possible. Revenue rises. Expectations rise faster. Jensen Huang puts on the leather jacket, says “accelerated computing,” and another small country’s gross domestic product appears in the company’s market value. I am impressed. I am also nervous. Those feelings are not contradictory. The stronger the company becomes, the more investors are tempted to treat the stock as a law of nature. But a great company and a safe investment are not the same thing. A stock can fall without the business faili...
For several years, dividend investors have been forced to sit quietly in the corner while growth stocks turned the market into their private awards ceremony. Artificial intelligence dominated the conversation. Mega-cap technology companies attracted enormous amounts of capital. Investors happily paid elevated valuations for businesses promising faster growth, wider margins, and a future in which apparently every refrigerator, automobile, toothbrush, and spreadsheet would require an advanced semiconductor. Meanwhile, the companies producing medicine, beverages, industrial equipment, energy, insurance, and dependable cash distributions were treated like furniture. Useful, certainly, but not something anyone felt compelled to discuss at dinner. I understand why. A rising stock is more exciting than a quarterly dividend. Nobody gathers the family around the computer to watch Coca-Cola deposit another distribution. A dividend does not flash across the screen, announce a revolutionary produc...