Institutional outflows leave Nvidia trailing chip rally

Institutional selling has pushed Nvidia’s Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) below zero. Nvidia shares are up about 15% year-to-date while peers including Broadcom, up roughly 20%, and AMD have posted larger gains.

Nvidia and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index have diverged in recent weeks. The two moved in opposite directions on about half of the past 50 trading sessions, a frequency near the highest since the 2022 bull market began and more than four times higher than at the start of April.

Options market activity shows growing downside interest in Nvidia since the company’s last earnings report. On the day of the report, the NVDA put-call volume ratio was about 0.46 and the put-call open-interest ratio about 0.79; those readings have shifted to roughly 0.45 for volume and about 0.85 for open interest, driven by rising open interest in puts. A higher open-interest ratio reflects more outstanding put contracts relative to calls.

Perpetual futures on the Hyperliquid platform display different positioning across trader cohorts. Tokenized NVDA perpetual contracts show smart-money and public-figure cohorts net long while the whale cohort is slightly net short. On the same platform, perpetual positions for Broadcom and AMD skew more heavily short across at least two cohorts.

Nvidia’s 30-day annualized implied volatility is about 33%, the highest among large-cap chip names except for Tesla. That level of volatility corresponds with active trading in venues that focus on price swings.

The CMF is the clearest institutional flow signal: it has dropped below zero and is testing a rising trendline drawn from early January. Over the most recent five trading days Nvidia’s share price rose about 2% while the CMF moved into negative territory. By contrast, AMD’s CMF is strongly positive. Broadcom’s June 3 earnings report coincided with increased attention to Nvidia’s rivals.

Taken together, the market shows rising put interest in options, mixed perpetual-futures positioning by cohort, and negative institutional cash flow for Nvidia, occurring alongside a broader chip-sector advance that has so far left Nvidia behind in year-to-date performance.