Nvidia’s (NVDA) stock isn’t having its typical year.

No epic gains on earning reports. Nvidia stock has fallen in response to earnings in six of the past eight quarters, including the last four, per Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace analysis.

No major out-performance versus the S&P 500. Nvidia’s stock is up 14% year to date, while the S&P 500 is up 12%.

No major out-performance versus other key players in the AI chip supply chain. Micron (MU) shares have gained a sizzling 225%. Intel (INTC) is up 138%. AMD (AMD) is up 124%.

Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold lists four reasons the chip king stock’s is stuck in neutral in a new note:

• How much more Nvidia can investors own: With a market cap of $5.2 trillion, the market may have a limited appetite for further exposure to Nvidia says Leopold.

• Lack of belief creep: Fear that the AI boom turns to a bust is on creeping up, Leopold notes.

• Law of large numbers: Decelerating growth is likely to come to Nvidia more obviously soon given how fast it has grown the past two years.

• Peak worries: Peaking growth and peaking margin are concerns on Nvidia, says Leopold.

“We have been disappointed with the stock’s year-to-date performance with the shares up only 12% largely matching the S&P 500 index. The stock trades with a 2027 GAAP P/E ratio of less than 15x, which is below the S&P 500’s 18.6x. The discount strikes us as fundamentally illogical considering that sales and net income growth still exceeds 20% in 2028 estimates. Typically, a company with sustainable growth, barriers to entry (e.g., Cuda, leading GPU performance), and healthy free cash flow trade with multiples above the overall market,” contends Leopold, who rates the stock a Strong Buy.

When Nvidia reports its must-read earnings after the close of trading today, it may put front and center some of these concerns out there in the market.

Chief among them is the bull Nvidia story is well known at this point.

The reality is that the market is positioned for the company to post something great and for CEO Jensen Huang to sound super bullish on the earnings call.

The market also knows there is minimal downside risk to Nvidia’s growing investment portfolio, given the rising valuations (see Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), for example) being afforded to most privately held names in artificial intelligence.

Leopold thinks the next catalyst for Nvidia’s stock are signs it’s grabbing a bigger piece of the CPU market.

“CPUs represent a low single-digit percent of Nvidia sales — roughly 3% today. In the past, Nvidia’s CPUs were tightly tied to its GPUs, but that should change, particularly with agentic use cases. While Nvidia’s CPU revenue is becoming material within the CPU market, we expect it to reach approximately 5% of total revenue by 2028 in our model — still a single-digit portion, yet the growth is the fastest among the elements we model,” says Leopold.