NVIDIA Slapped With Class Action Lawsuit Tied To Cryptocurrency Implosion (hothardware.com) 171
Long-time Slashdot reader foxalopex writes:
It looks like Nvidia is going to be hit with a class action for investors who lost big when their stock price crashed more than 50% due to an overstock of GPU cards that were produced for the crypto-currency craze back in 2018.
The suit claims investors were told Nvidia had control of the situation until it crashed worse than even Nvidia had anticipated.
"The Company's public statements were false and materially misleading," argues the complaint from a Los Angeles law firm, seeking investors who purchased shares in NVIDIA between August 10, 2017 and November 15, 2018.
It was on November 15 that NVIDIA issued a statement that "excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom...will be corrected." Citing new products for machine learning, film rendering, and cloud computing, they added that "Our market position and growth opportunities are stronger than ever."
"The Company's public statements were false and materially misleading," argues the complaint from a Los Angeles law firm, seeking investors who purchased shares in NVIDIA between August 10, 2017 and November 15, 2018.
It was on November 15 that NVIDIA issued a statement that "excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom...will be corrected." Citing new products for machine learning, film rendering, and cloud computing, they added that "Our market position and growth opportunities are stronger than ever."
Well, there's a bit of truth... (Score:3)
Re:Well, there's a bit of truth... (Score:5, Interesting)
Investors that have blind faith in company forecasts are getting what they deserve. They are legally obligated to report past and current, but they will always dream of an amazing future. Do your homework before buying stock.
"But they LIED to us when they said they expected things would improve!!" No, optimism is not lying. Thank you for your money, now go home.
Re:Well, there's a bit of truth... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you for your money, now go home.
NVIDIA didn't even get the money. These shares were purchased on the secondary market.
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No, optimism is not lying.
They didn't just express "optimism". They stated as fact that the overstock "will be corrected", when in fact they had no plan to fix the problem.
When you are a public company, you can't just go out and make false or misleading official statements.
They didn't have to make a statement about the overstock, but when they did make a statement, then they had a fiduciary duty to be scrupulously honest with their investors, and they didn't do that. They should have followed my grandmother's advice: "If you have
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"Certain statements....are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof"
Unless they said something that was actually false at the time they said it, then this case is unlikely to have success.
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Such communications from companies are always prefaced by appropriate legal disclaimers.
There is plenty of legal precedent that disclaimers provide very limited protection for false or misleading statements from public companies.
Unless they said something that was actually false at the time they said it ...
They said the overstock "will be" corrected. They didn't say "maybe", or "we hope", or "if our prayers are answered". They said "will be" when they had no plan to accomplish that, and knew, or should have known, that it was unlikely to happen.
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You don't even know that nvidia's GPUs were garbage for bitcoin, and no one sane mined bitcoin with them.
Crypto boom's GPU market was in ethereum.
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Which is irrelevant for this story, as GPUs being talked about didn't exist that far in the past.
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And it's a good thing for them they didn't have a plan! What they provided shareholders and potential investors with was a forecast... a statement of what they anticipated would occur in the future, as a result of factors they obviously did not have full control over. I can say I hope to win the lottery in tomorrow's drawing, and that's not a lie. And you'd be
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Show me where they said they knew for sure it would correct. Or where they said "we know for a fact".
There is no material difference between "We will do X" and "We know for sure we will do X" or "We know for a fact that we will do X".
They are all false statements if you are not going to do X.
This pisses me off (Score:2)
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Nvidia was crystal clear that the crypto boom was temporary.
NVIDIA was crystal clear that they knew it was temporary and had measures in place to ensure a continuity of sales and not oversupply the channel.
Except they didn't.
They'll probably settle it and waste money that could go to making better and cheaper cards.
As opposed to wasting money oversupplying the channel for something they *knew* was temporary?
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NVIDIA was crystal clear that they knew it was temporary and had measures in place to ensure a continuity of sales and not oversupply the channel.
Except they didn't.
Exactly this. It's not hard to find the news articles on exchange sites, or hell even forex oriented news sites with nvidia pumping that they had 'contingency' plans if the market fell out, and all that. Now they have assloads of cards that are already depreciated and are getting worse, and they haven't managed to catch up to the latest tick-tock cycle leading to their fabbing being way-way-way behind along with a manufacturing shortage of available PCB space. Their solution to self-created card shortage
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Okay.... I have had up to.... *HERE* wth this. Sorry, I don't mean to take this out on you specifically, but I'm afraid your comment is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me. I know this entire comment is OT, and I'll probably be modded as such to hell and back, but I feel like I really need to say this.
"Depreciated" is a verb. It is the simple past tense and past participle form of the infinitive "to depreciate". T
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Your post helped me to understand why more and more people are starting to ignore some of the more arcane grammar rules. It's because they don't actually clarify things they are simply rules for the sake of rules. Thanks for that at least. This is a serious post, not trolling.
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Nobody but people who spent 7 years in english lit., and has a degree in it uses the words in those forms. That's how it's been in the automotive industry for 40 years and it's spilled into the mainstream, welcome to how languages change. You find depreciated used in both forms for an object that is declining invalue having been sold, and existing stock that exists and will not sell in every trade magazine, automotive book, and in the general lexicon of buyers and sellers in everything from coins to house
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[Citation Required] In many ways:
- Deprecate does not list an adjective form in any dictionary.
- Deprecate is expressly listed as as "lowering value" in the Cambridge dictionary in its second form
- Deprecate is defined in the Oxford dictionary in the context of "computing" (sense 1.1) to mean "to be considered outdated and best avoided, even though you can still use it, usually because it has been replaced with a newer feature"
- Deprecate is defined in the Oxford dictionary as a synonym to depreciate (sense
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1) deprecated
2) That is a malformation that comes from the expression "self-deprecate", which originally was "self-depreciate". In virtually any other context beyond talking about a person's self esteem, sense of worth, or the like, it does not mean that. Also, note that I said "in general" they are not interchangeable.
3) True... but if you are saying that something is best avoided, are you not then also providing an express disapproval of it?
4) Again, only in very specific contexts. In general, they
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1) deprecated
Past tense verb according to all dictionaries and none list them as an adjective. You are literally going against the rule book while calling out the OP for the same using (admittedly incorrectly) depreciated which as you rightly pointed out is also not an adjective.
Bottom line, the use is archaic, but it's not wrong, and at least 1 (2 if you count Google as a valid source) dictionary lists it as a synonym in the general case too.
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Several of the examples on the page mentioned given illustrate this usage.
Depreciated, while a past participle, is not an example of such a verb. To say that "X is depreciated" is about as gramatically correct as saying as saying "X is slept" instead of "X is sleepy" or "Y is died" instead of "Y is dead".
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Incorrect. Depreciated also describes a present state [accountingcoach.com]. To say that "x is [fully] depreciated" is not only gramatically correct, it is the predominant usage [google.com].
Now take your prescriptive gammarian ass to France, because English grammar is not dictated by a regulator [wikipedia.org].
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Your own source disagrees with you [cambridge.org]:
"Examples of 'depreciated'
In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use."
"These estimates do not include capital charges since the applicable scanners currently in use are fully depreciated.
From Cambridge English Corpus"
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In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives.
So we've gone full circle to your original post. I deduct a further 2 points from your original post as you disproved your own complaint about the adjective use of "depreciated".
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It's a past participle being used as an adjective, as allowed by proper grammar [grammarly.com], and you're not only wrong, but a twit.
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Well, I did a little more research... turns out I was wrong... sort of. I was right in that the original post was not grammatically correct, but I was not exactrly right about the reason. "Depreciated" can indeed be an adjective... however, it cannot be used as an adjective followed by a conjugation of "to be".
The applicable general rule governing the conversion of a past participle to an adjective is that it cannot be done on intransitive verbs. Where you come across exceptions to this is when a ver
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Really? Was it a typo of deprecate? Or was it a misuse of the participle form of depreciate? If the latter, it should have read "... is already depreciating" for a present partciple, or "... have already depreciated" for a past participle.
Since, as I said, depreciate and deprecate are not usually interchangeable, the meaning of what was being said varies greatly depending on what word was meant. But contextually, it is conceivab
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Past participle forms cannot always be used as adjectives.. this is particularly true for intransitive verbs but there are some intransitive verbs that can be used transitively for which you cannot use the past participle as an adjective either.
To combine the past participle of "to deprecate" with a subject, one must utilize some conjugation of "to have", not "to be".
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NVIDIA was crystal clear that they knew it was temporary and had measures in place to ensure a continuity of sales and not oversupply the channel.
Except they didn't.
Those are some fine goalposts you're moving, there. It was the correct business decision for nvidia to take advantage of the crypto mining demand. They publicly stated that it would be a temporary boom. Now that sales are easing back down to where they were, investors are complaining. That's stupid. They should be happy that nvidia made money while it could. If they didn't, it just would have been AMD, a little later.
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I'm not moving the goalposts, you're just playing the wrong sport. This is a discussion about the lawsuit. The lawsuit is about NVIDIA's fraudulent statements. The GP took *half* of NVIDIA's public statements (the bit that wasn't fraudulent) and used that as a reason why he's not happy with the lawsuit. I'm pointing out the fact: yes NVIDIA did state that it was temporary, but NVIDIA also said they had contingencies that made them immune to the end of the boom.
They didn't.
They got sued for their fraudulent
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yes NVIDIA did state that it was temporary, but NVIDIA also said they had contingencies that made them immune to the end of the boom.
And they do. You're acting like they claimed the boom would go on forever, which is a failure of comprehension at best. They claimed that the end of the boom wouldn't hurt them. And aside from short investors manipulating the market, it hasn't. They didn't spend money adding a bunch of production to serve the boom, because they knew it was temporary. All they had to do to have contingencies to make them immune to failure as a result of the end of the boom, which was the actual claim, was to not put on more
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And they do.
And they didn't.
You're acting like they claimed the boom would go on forever
Nope. Not acting anything of the like. Notice how AMD isn't being sued?
which is a failure of comprehension at best
That's an ironic given how at no point I've ever said the boom should go on forever.
They claimed that the end of the boom wouldn't hurt them.
Except it did severely damaging their supply chain.
They didn't spend money adding a bunch of production to serve the boom, because they knew it was temporary.
Except they did, and they added production and oversupplied due to the boom despite knowing it was temporary.
You're moving goalposts everywhere and declaring victory. Bullshit.
A lot of people here call you a troll, but the reality is that you just have very poor English comprehension. I cannot state this enough. Every single thing you have said has been w
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The problem that statement is that Nvidia doesn't seem to be interested in providing faster and cheaper cards. They really only seem to be interested in manufacturing the higher end cards with better profit margins, and seemingly letting the rest of their product line stagnate.
Hell... for most of last year, it seems that they were purposefully keeping supplies of their higher end (1060/1070/1080) cards low so they could get higher than MSRP prices for them. It was actually working out for them pretty well u
Repurpose mining hardware.,. (Score:2)
to solve encryptions i.e. wikileaks insurance files.
"back in 2018" (Score:5, Funny)
IT WAS SIX DAYS AGO
Oh the memories. (Score:2)
Hey, guys, remember back when there were people shouting that 2018 was "SIX DAYS AGO"? ;)
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IT WAS SIX DAYS AGO
Wrong, it wasn't even 5 days ago. More like 4 days + 15 hours ago in the US. Hint: There is no January 0.
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IT WAS SIX DAYS AGO
Wrong, it wasn't even 5 days ago. More like 4 days + 15 hours ago in the US. Hint: There is no January 0.
Six days ago it was most definitely 2018. So maybe not wrong at all. If he'd said, "2018 ended six days ago," he'd have been wrong.
This should be illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
Either vote in a new board or sell your stock. Suing your partners to make up for your own ignorant investments makes you the most worthless kind of human being.
Re:This should be illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
Time was when the small print was "the value of your investment can go down as well as up"
Looks as though these folk never read that part, and now want to blame someone else
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Looks as though these folk never read that part, and now want to blame someone else
Folks read that part just fine. But when the company comes out and said our stock won't go down for reason X because we did Y, and it turns out Y was bogus and the stock crashed due to reason X that is called a "fraudulent claim to investors" and is grounds for a lawsuit.
You may notice that AMD isn't being sued despite having the same drop.
Re: This should be illegal (Score:2)
It's all guess work. CEOs don't have some magic power to separate out sales with 100% precision. The fact Nvidia was wrong doesn't make them frauds.
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It's all guess work. CEOs don't have some magic power to separate out sales with 100% precision.
No, it's all legal distinction. You're right CEOs don't have magic power and therefore they should not make the claims they did. Shit happens, they'll learn to be more careful in their quarterly earnings reports next time.
The fact Nvidia was wrong doesn't make them frauds.
That depends entirely on precisely how they said that "wrong" thing. When you say you're guessing at something it pays off not to specifically mention exactly what and why something will happen. Specifically don't say your Gaming sales are strong and growing at a rate that will ensure the
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IANAL however my understanding is that if they say "we expect" something and actually do expect that with available information then it isn't a false statement even if what they expected didn't happen due to factors outside their control. They possibly knew there was a chance of overstock but had accounted for that and made mitigations for it with the new AI uses etc, however what they couldn't possibly control, know or predict was the shareholders, for no real reason, to suddenly dump sell shares on the b
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There is a material difference between terms like "secured" and "expect". The former is a term based on something that has already happened or not happened. Either the handshake and signing has happened or it has not. The latter conveys a belied, hopefully backed by some facts, about the future. But it is only a belief.
Expectations can be thwarted by things like the market crashing harder or sooner than expected.
Look at the fine print on press releases. They generally have a disclaimer abut forward looking [wikipedia.org]
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Not directly, anyway.
Re: This should be illegal (Score:2)
Please link to the fraudulent statement so I can point out where your reading comprehension failed.
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Please link to the fraudulent statement so I can point out where your reading comprehension failed.
Jeesh some people need to be spoon fed. Why not follow the links in TFA through to the actual legal filing?
"Specifically, defendants: (1) assured investors that NVIDIA followed the market closely and could adjust to rapid changes in the cryptocurrency markets; (2) touted that NVIDIA and its executives are “masters at managing our channel, and we understand the channel very well.”; and (3) assured investors that surging demand for graphics processing units (“GPUs”) among cryptocurrenc
Re: This should be illegal (Score:2)
1. Nvidia follows market closely: true statement
2. Can adjust to rapid changes: never specified how rapid; opinion-based statement that cannot be false
3. Masters at managing channels: if you claim Nvidia is not a master in their industry, the burden of proof is on you
4. Understand channel very well: qualitative statement, cannot be false
5. Assured surging crypto demand would not have a negative impact: incorrect statement; oops; being wrong isn't fraud
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
...If crypto currency has crashed and there's a glut of these top end gpus, such that their stock crashed and a class action suit is rolling....where can I get that crazy cheap GPU? I can certainly use one, and there should be rivers of them for sale cheap, no?
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And you don't know how they were run. If they were overclocked or run in poorly ventilated areas, they may have significantly shorter remaining lifespans than you would expect for their age.
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they may have significantly shorter remaining lifespans than you would expect for their age.
Define "shorter." In my 29 years of messing with hardware I have yet to replace a failed graphics card. No system I have ever used has lasted long enough that either the card was upgraded or entire system was replaced first. If someone tells me the lifespan of a card is 15 years but overclocking will reduce that by 50%, what do I care if abusing it will cause that to happen?
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They're trickling them onto the market at near full retail because they have a new generation of hardware to sell. My guess is it will fire sale after R&D is recouped on the new stuff or get buried in the desert next to ET (figuratively speaking, of course, due to prevalent e-recycling laws).
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Inventory problem is with 1060s, and AMD is competitive in that segment today.
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And yet a new Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti still costs double what it cost in November, 2017. I thought excess stock led to price drops.
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Maybe they're learning from Apple. If so, they'll sell the same model for 5 years with no price drops and when the new model comes out the old one comes off the market entirely.
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and they'll remove the headphone jack!
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And make you use a proprietary HDMI dongle for audio....oh wait, they already do that.
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Additionally,
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Additionally, nVidia didn't overproduce the 1080 Ti
This is pretty much the whole story, it wasn't a card popular with miners so it saw no inflated demand so nVidia doesn't have any unsold inventory. Looking at the online retailers here in Norway nobody has any in stock and the last stragglers seem to have sold out in end of November. If you want to buy new it's now 2000 series prices so if you can find a 1080 Ti that's what it'll be priced against. If you ignore all the new ray-tracing stuff it's a >10 TFLOPS card matching the RTX 2080, so no reason to s
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I'm sure nVidia pushed hard for it, and pushed the blame for the high prices as well. While fingers were pointing every which way, nobody in the crypto-currency echo chambers online wanted to address the elephant in the room, which is
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
100 or so years ago one of the first economic crises of overproduction characterized as such hit Europe.
Instead of selling their farm stock cheap farmers chose to destroy their products. Giving stuff away costs distribution money, destroying them costs less.
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
100 or so years ago one of the first economic crises of overproduction characterized as such hit Europe.
Instead of selling their farm stock cheap farmers chose to destroy their products. Giving stuff away costs distribution money, destroying them costs less.
This is interesting but not the problem here. The thing here is that there is no oversupply of GPU cards. There is only an oversupply of GPUs in the upper end of the supply chain. The mining crash and the desire not to further drop prices on already purchased units by OEMs mean that these aren't being sold. The retail market is sitting quite happily at the RRP and there's no incentive for them to drop.
Farming equivalence: An oversupply of wheat does not mean that there are mountains of bread laying around being sold for bargain prices.
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Excellent rebuttal! :-)
Of course I know very little about what kinda GPU are used.
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A few months ago we bought a Tesla at 50% off. The mining/datacenter gear is pretty cheap right now, nVidia has been giving free gear to researchers for a while. Home GPU's are not the channel they are talking about.
Break into an Nvidia warehouse (Score:2)
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eBay is filled with mostly used/abused mining gear. It might be burned in well enough, but I imagine a lot of thermal damage too
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Actually most miners, with the exception of morons with too much money to begin with... Keep the cards rather cool. A lot cooler than you would have gaming in a pc case. None of my GPU's ever went above 65c, I know a few large mining ops that had warehouses full. and they stayed at around 50-60c because of the enviornment they were in. Typical gaming load in a consumer case is going to see gpu temps of 85c+ unless you have a very very well ventilated case with tons of fans and decent room temp. Also mining
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If by mining gear you mean GPUs that don't thermally cycle and are more than likely to have spent their life undervolted and are thus in excellent condition then yes you'd be right.
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What company makes a product that damages itself from normal use?
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Anyone making physical objects? Google "entropy".
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Sure, better than thermal cycling. But still probably a lot of wear compared to new. You wouldn't really be able to compare until years out comparing the failure time vs buying new cards.
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I've been trying to score a 1060 6gb (Score:2)
a butterfly will be sued for causing a typhoon (Score:2)
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you can't do that if you know you're wrong. Proving that they knew they were wrong when they said it... that's the challenging bit.
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Nvidia is being sued for not being fortune tellers?
NVidia is being sued for blatantly lying to investors. They knew that their massive revenue increases were due to crypto miners, so it's an absolute no-brainer that the implosion of crypto-mining was going to cause a corresponding drop in revenues. However, NVidia's rosy statements to investors were straight out lies, and the executives making those statements knew they were lying.
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Nvidia is being sued for not being fortune tellers?
No NVIDIA is being sued for pretending to be fortune tellers. If they had done nothing then there would be no grounds to sue but instead they said: "We can see this coming and we've put mitigation in place, it won't affect us." And then it did affect them.
That is called making a fraudulent statement to investors.
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Machine learning != oracle.
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Investors think profits are guaranteed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish they'd have lowered prices (Score:2)
Hehe. Overstocked gpus but they sure as hell never lowered price. Prices are still inflated
What if was not deliberate? (Score:2)
Okay, I get that... but doesn't the word "intentionally" need to be in there somewhere?
Investing is always risky (Score:2)
Those who have yet to learn this probably shouldn't be investing in the first place.
Welcome to reality where you are not guaranteed to earn anything on any investments you may have made.
Where the slightest bullshit ( oh noez, Apple had a bad quarter ) wipes out Billions of dollars in a single day.
In my opinion, it's the idiots investing in Nvidia right in the middle of the CryptoCurrency boom not realizing what's driving record sales who are at fault here.
Wait, did I just get this straight? (Score:2)
Investors now want to get their investment risk reimbursed by court mandate when they found out that they misinterpreted the expectations for Bitcoins?
Fuck, we're lucky they didn't get that bright idea back when they misjudged what dot.com would be like. If this flies, you can essentially be a complete illiterate idiot and throw your money about as you please, if your investments take off, you get to cash in big ("as a compensation for the big risk you took", yeah, right), and if it turns out that you had n
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Story isn't talking about BTC mining.
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For now.
They're about to close for good.
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In this world? No, we're used to getting bailed out when we gambled away our money! Bail us out! Now! We're investors! We're important! Too big to fail!
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They're already so detached from reality that not getting insane revenue for investment is already a loss. In other words, compensate me for not fulfilling what I expected from you with no reason!