OT - Nvidia's flagship new graphics card (Pascal architecture) was available for sale today - well, theoretically, because all pre-orders were sold out, as well as (I checked) Best Buy has it listed at retail suggested price - $699, but it's unavailable for both store pickup or shipping. Not reading too much into this, because it's obviously a 'bleeding edge' product: The CEO called the performance "insane", and every review I've read backs that up, no question about it. Nvidia claims that in some applications, it'll be 200-300% faster than the current highest model - the Titan GTX - which carried a price tag above $1k.  I know it's a limited high-end market, but Nvidia just keeps eating AMD's lunch - sometimes both in hardware ability and software (drivers) ability. I have to seriously think about whether to send back the GTX 980 Ti I bought a couple of weeks ago at an insanely great price ($499) I thought, at the moment.

AMD is scheduled to reveal their new architcture, Polaris, in the next week or two. From what I've heard, not intended to compete in the high end, it will be priced and performanced at mainsteram gaming. Although one good effect of it will be that between Polaris and Pascal, PCs will be VR-ready, and should help the VR sector get off the ground. Nvidia's stock is now at perhaps all time highs, and more than double its 52 week low around $19. I still think there is growth, but I can't get my hand to pull the trigger at this point. I know they've very likely beaten estimates for some time. Way, way back in the mists of time, perhaps 15 or more years, I bought Nvidia around 37 and in a short while it rocketed to about $160/sh. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd be worried if Nvidia isn't pricey at this point.  One might note that AMD has itself rocketed to over $4, but I'm not clear on what the good news is.

A good many months ago, I took a flyer on Palo Alto networks (PANW) at arouond $142. Went up to 200, regressed to $120, went up to $160, and today is getting killed because of disappointing something, and a downgrade from several places, including Deutcsh Bank (I think) which lowered it from buy to neutral and dropped it's PT down to $150. So PANW is now about $130, and I'm hearing opinions that 2014-2015 was clearly a 'security sector bubble', and the sector is way over priced. Why is this of any regard? Because I keep thinking that robotics is going to be a great growth story, but I don't know whether it's way ahead of itself or not. I see that there's an Oppenheimer mutual fund for that, with the advert headline "Inhuman is ....beautiful" or something like that. lt cap had mentioned Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) when I brought this topic up several months ago, and it's on my watch list. It is near its 52 week high (and all time, I think), 52 week range beiing about $450 low to $650 high. It seems to be tracing the overly-expectant path that security sector software did, but it's only one stock, so I can't say it's a representative view, altho I'd be intersted to see whether that's true in a broader scope of view