Nvidia Stock At $174: Could It Repeat Microsoft's Lost Decade? Trefis Team Thu, November 12, 2026 at 4:42 AM EST 2 min read MSFT -0.22% NVDA -6.85% NOK -0.23% GOOGM 0.00% AAPL +0.20% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Part 3 of our Microsoft and AI series. Start with part 1: How Microsoft Missed $2 Trillion In AI.
Remember the Windows Phone? Or using Bing on purpose? Microsoft spent the 2000s missing the things that changed how we live: search went to Google, the phone in your pocket went to Apple. In 2015 it wrote off $7.5 billion of its Nokia phone business. Bing still has about 4.8% of the world's searches.
The stock told the story. It peaked in December 1999 and didn't close above that level again until October 2016, almost 17 years later. From the end of 2002 to early 2014, it returned about 91% with dividends, roughly 6% a year.
And that was buying after the crash: a buyer at the 1999 peak was still down about 17%, with dividends, when Satya Nadella took over as CEO. That is the real risk of paying a peak price for a great company. For families with a few million dollars in a handful of tech leaders, the question isn't whether those stocks recover, but whether their plan can wait. Could yours? Test it with a Trefis partner firm in a free 15-minute call.
A new boss and a new business. Nadella became CEO in February 2014 and bet the company on the cloud. Since then, Microsoft has returned about 17.4 times, with dividends. The lesson isn't that great companies always recover. It's that it took a new leader and a new product to do it.
The setup rhymes: the leaders are priced as winners, and the next wave may belong to someone else. Nvidia is 27% below its high even as its sales boom. The difference from 1999 is that today's leaders earn far more of their value in profits. The risk is the price you pay, not the business.
Plan for the wait you can live with. Buying a great company at a peak price can cost you a decade. Size your AI bets so that a Microsoft-style wait wouldn't wreck your plan.
Is the AI model really the most important part? (part 2)
If you have $1 million or more invested, get a second opinion on how long you could wait in a free 15-minute call with a Trefis partner firm.
For questions about this article or underlying research, email help@trefis.com.
