▶ Full Post Text
This got long, because it's been a six month ride and I want to lay the whole thing out, the data, the doubt, all of it, because I am genuinely torn on what to do now and I want the sanity check.
Back in late November I was running my usual screen, which leans more on operational data than on price or multiples, and Marvell kept flagging. The weird part was the stock itself was doing nothing. It had been going between $77 and $87 for weeks and every headline was Nvidia or Broadcom.
But three things underneath did not match the dead price.
First, hiring. Their open roles had roughly tripled off the 2024 base, from around 105 postings to north of 300, and they kept adding month after month. Companies do not staff up that aggressively to run a flat business and most likely they were planning for a lot more volume than the stock implied.
Second, the people inside were getting more bullish, not quieter. The share of employees reporting a positive business outlook on Glassdoor had climbed into the mid 80s and kept grinding higher every single month. Academic and financial studies consistently show a strong, positive link between high Glassdoor employee ratings and superior stock market performance.
Third, and this is the one that sealed it, Nvidia had put $2 billion into them and thats when most people heard about the stock.
I also forced myself to look at everything that did not support the thesis, because confirmation bias kills accounts. Small things like web traffic being flat, social mentions were nothing. Google search interest was on the floor. And not one wall-street analyst had moved, the consensus sat at 27 buy ratings for months and just stayed there. Oddly all that information that made me more comfortable, because it meant if the operational data was right, I was early instead of late.
So in January I bought around $82 and told myself I would give it a full year.
Then nothing happened for weeks. It drifted down to about $77.50 in early February and just sat there. This is the part nobody includes in their "I caught a 4x" posts. There was a solid six week stretch where I was red on the position, the thesis was invisible to everyone else, and I seriously asked myself whether I had talked myself into a value trap on a glorified data vendor. The hiring numbers kept climbing the whole time, and honestly that was the only thing that kept me from bailing.
Mid March it finally twitched. It cleared $90, then $94, then closed above $100 by the end of the month. Nothing violent, but the chop was over and it was putting in higher lows. April is when it stopped being subtle: $121, then $135, then $152 by late April. The data center story everyone ignored at $80 was suddenly the only thing being written about. And the social and search data I mentioned earlier, the stuff that was flat all winter, only started spiking in April and May, right as the price ran. The crowd showed up months after the hiring data did.
Late May they reported, and that was the real gap. Revenue came in at $2.22 billion, up from $1.16 billion two years ago and stair stepping higher every quarter, and the stock jumped from the low $200s toward $270 on the print and the guide. Early June it consolidated around $275, then this week it went vertical again. Nvidia's CEO made bullish comments, a $2 billion AI chip alliance hit the headlines, and yesterday it closed near $290. Today it's up another 12% to $325 after news that Apple is moving chip work to Intel domestically, and Marvell and Tower Semi announced they've now shipped over five million coherent photonic ICs for AI data centers. On top of all that, Jensen Huang stood up at Computex and called Marvell the next trillion dollar company. He was half joking. The market did not take it as a joke.
My position is up roughly 4x. On paper it's the best call I've made in years.
Here's why I'm posting instead of taking a victory lap.
The exact operational data that got me in is still bullish. Employee outlook just printed a fresh all time high at 89% this month. Hiring is still rising. By my own framework, the signal that has been right the entire way has not rolled over even a little.
But every classic top signal is screaming at the same time. The CEO has been selling the whole way up, real reductions in his holdings, including 7,500 shares at $298 just last week, and he is not the only insider lightening up. The P/E is 96 (so what, who looks at this anymore), so one soft guide erases months of gains in a single session. And the retail crowd that ignored this at $80 has crowded in over the last eight weeks, right as buzz peaked and started rolling over, which is usually late cycle behavior.
So I'm sitting here with a leading indicator that's been correct for six straight months telling me to hold, and insider behavior plus valuation plus crowd timing all telling me to take the four bagger and walk. I have never been in this exact spot, where my best signal and the textbook sell case point this hard in opposite directions.
For those of you who actually build a process around operational or alternative data: when your leading signals stay bullish but insiders are clearly selling into a stretched multiple, which one wins? Do you ride the signal that got you there, or respect the people who run the company quietly heading for the exits?