Retail traders did something Wall Street didn't expect the moment Nvidia's biggest name walked away from the company he built.
Nvidia shares dropped as much as 14% on Thursday, November 12, 2026, after co-founder Jensen Huang resigned as president and chief executive officer, but a record wave of retail buying pulled the stock back to roughly a 5% loss by afternoon trading in New York.
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Nvidia Stock Rout Retail Buyers Turned Into a Dip-Buying Frenzy
The sell-off started the moment markets opened. Nvidia had already lost ground over the previous five weeks, and Huang's abrupt exit added a fresh shock on top of that slide. Shares gapped down hard, and for a short window it looked like the Nvidia stock rout would deepen into one of the worst single-day drops in the company's history.
Then something unusual happened. Vanda Research tracked $111 million in net retail buying during just the first 30 minutes of trading. That is the largest opening-half-hour retail inflow into Nvidia that Vanda has on record, and more than 40 times what a normal opening period looks like. Fidelity's internal order data told a similar story. By noon Eastern time, Fidelity customers had placed 394,818 buy orders for Nvidia against only 80,088 sell orders, a lopsided ratio that shows individual investors were not running from the stock. They were chasing it.
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Jensen Huang's Sudden Resignation Shook Nvidia to Its Core
Nvidia confirmed the leadership change in a short statement from its board of directors. The company said Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately. In the same announcement, Nvidia said Colette Kress, the company's Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, has agreed to serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer while continuing her CFO duties.
The resignation followed reports about Huang's personal relationships, including allegations that one woman connected to him may have been tied to a foreign intelligence effort. Nvidia's newsroom said the board is initiating an independent investigation in light of that reporting. Other reports indicated the board had already met the night before, on November 11, to discuss whether Huang should stay in his role, as the company worked through the fallout from the allegations.
Thirty-Three Years at the Helm Ends Without Warning
Huang co-founded Nvidia and ran it for about 33 years, turning a graphics-chip maker into the company that powers much of the world's artificial intelligence computing. He was reported to own close to 3.6% of Nvidia's shares, making him the company's fourth-largest investor. Before this week's decline, Nvidia had been valued at roughly $4 trillion, a scale almost impossible to separate from Huang's public image as the face of the AI boom.
That is part of why his exit hit the stock so hard right out of the gate. Nvidia had already shed more than $1 trillion in market value over the five weeks leading up to this announcement, and losing the one executive most closely tied to its AI strategy raised fresh questions about what comes next. The board also named Harvey Jones, a former Synopsys chief executive and current Nvidia director, as the company's first-ever board chair, a governance change that may matter as the succession process plays out.
Retail Confidence Clashes With Institutional Caution
The gap between how retail traders and bigger institutional investors reacted was stark. Individual investors treated the drop as a buying opportunity, piling in within minutes of the opening bell. Professional investors seemed far more cautious, weighing whether a company this closely tied to one founder can keep executing at the same pace without him steering it. That tension is exactly why the stock opened down 14% and only clawed back to around a 5% loss, rather than fully recovering.
Analysts covering the retail flows described the dip-buying as a sign the broader AI trade is still very much alive, even with Nvidia's leadership in flux. But that short-term rebound does not answer the bigger questions hanging over the company. Nothing in Nvidia's statement explained the personal details behind Huang's departure, and no public comment from Huang himself has surfaced addressing the resignation directly.
What Nvidia Investors Are Watching Next
Colette Kress now runs the company on an interim basis while Nvidia's board searches for a permanent chief executive, looking at both internal and external candidates. There is no announced timeline for when that search will wrap up. The board's independent investigation into the foreign intelligence allegations is also still open, with no stated completion date.
For now, Nvidia is a company without its founding CEO for the first time in over three decades, led temporarily by its finance chief, and under formal investigation over allegations that touch on national security concerns. Retail investors have placed their bet that the business itself is still sound. Whether institutional investors, major customers, and the market as a whole reach the same conclusion will depend on what the board's investigation finds and who eventually takes the corner office for good.
