Nvidia's Beat Lifts Bitcoin to $80,000 Even as Its Own Valuation Sinks to 2019 Lows

Nvidia's fiscal second-quarter results, digested in the session that closed Wednesday, August 26, 2026, produced the day's most important number: an 8% jump in the shares even though the earnings beat expectations. The twist was that Nvidia's valuation multiple — the price investors will pay for each dollar of profit — fell to its lowest level since 2019, despite the company's profit having doubled over the past year. A stock that rallies while getting cheaper on a profit basis usually means one thing: the market believes the growth is real but is no longer willing to pay up for it the way it once did. The rally did not stay confined to Nvidia. Bitcoin, which has no direct claim on Nvidia's earnings, rose in tandem and touched $80,000, a level tied to "extreme greed" positioning across risk assets — the mechanism being that a strong result from the market's biggest AI bellwether encourages cash sitting on the sidelines to chase the next-riskiest trade, and cryptocurrency is usually first in line. The chip supply chain split rather than moved together: Kioxia said it would invest $6.27 billion in a new memory plant in Japan, a bet that implies confidence in sustained order flow, while Cathie Wood's ARK fund used the session to buy Broadcom and sell AMD, a rotation signalling diverging conviction about which suppliers benefit most from Nvidia's cycle. Salesforce supplied the day's cleanest positive story. Its shares jumped 14% after the company paired an AI product partnership with raised full-year guidance, reversing a prior slump. Three separate Wall Street firms raised their price targets on the stock inside the same session — a rare cluster that happens when a company gives analysts a specific, checkable reason, in this case the guidance raise and the AI tie-up, to revise numbers together rather than wait for the next quarter. Elsewhere the pattern ran the other way: solid results did not protect share prices. Wesfarmers reported profit up 8.3% and still saw its shares slip. Verve Group grew revenue 6.5% and affirmed its guidance, yet its shares plunged regardless. Moderna's shares fell after it priced a $2 billion convertible notes offering — convertible notes are debt that can later turn into shares, so pricing one signals both a need for cash now and future dilution, which the market moved to price in immediately. Dollar Tree shares also fell, with investors said to be questioning what comes next even without a specific negative figure attached. The common thread across all four: headline growth and guidance were not what was being priced; what came after was. Going into the next session, the open question is who finances the AI and space buildouts behind several of the week's other headlines. Anthropic added a $45 billion lease for Nvidia chips only weeks after committing heavily to AMD hardware, stacking large compute commitments from two suppliers at once. Nebius raised fresh money through a debt offering immediately after a major run-up in its stock, choosing borrowed money over new shares while its price was high. Neither the companies nor the market have yet shown how that debt gets repaid if demand growth slows. Separately, Rupert Murdoch's consideration of reuniting Fox and News Corp sent both stocks swinging through the session without resolving whether a deal would happen or on what terms. The Buy List 2026 model portfolio, holding €110,000 across 22 positions, was valued at €117,107 by the close, a total return of 6.46% once dividends are included, against 5.98% on price alone. Its internal spread illustrated the day's Nvidia-to-bitcoin link directly: MicroStrategy, a company whose stock functions largely as a leveraged proxy for bitcoin holdings, was the portfolio's best performer at +40.18%, while Vonovia, the German residential landlord with no exposure to the AI trade, was the worst at -17.10%. Tesla sat at -7.69% and GameStop at -4.04%, both reminders that not every position moved for the same reason as the session's headline story.