The 'pullback folks have been waiting for': Nvidia spikes as top analyst lifts his price target

Nvidia is closing in on its all-time high of $174.56, tradng up 5.91% at $165.17 a share, after one of Wall Street's top analysts on the stock raised his price target.

Canaccord Genuity's Matthew Ramsey, who is rated by Bloomberg as the third best analyst on the stock, lifted his price target to $190 a share and said that this is the "pullback that folks have been waiting for..."

Ramsey believes that shares were "priced to perfection" in the near-term, but that Friday's drop of more than 5% gave investors who have been on the sidelines a chance to get in.

Nvidia shares have rallied more than 55% so far in 2017, including Monday's move, as investors have climbed aboard in the wake of the company's chips becoming increasingly popular for mining cryptocurrecies. On Monday, bitcoin plowed through the $4,000, $4,100, $4,200 and $4,300 levels for the first time.

"In addition to strong gaming sales, we believe new crypto-currency demand added up to $250M to the topline ($150M in OEM revenue and another bit of upside in GeForce cards) and while this demand will likely decline Q/Q, management believes NVIDIA is well positioned to serve the market long-term."

But cryptocurrencies aren't the only thing powering Nvidia shares ahead.

"In fact, as applications of highly parallel GPU computing expand and developer tools and artificial intelligence algorithms mature, our positive thesis continues to play out with strong gaming GPU growth expected to continue in H2/F'18 with the Pascal gaming ramp and Volta introduction, and we believe new trends including deep learning, virtual/augmented reality, and autonomous driving will catalyze new market growth longer term," Ramsey wrote.

Nvidia shares seem to be shrugging off the launch of rival AMD's new Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64 graphics cards, which are the company's long-awaited answer to Nvidia's dominant GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards.

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