Just watched the dust settle from Nvidia's GTC conference last month, and there's a compelling case to be made about how we should actually think about buying this stock.

So here's what went down: Jensen Huang took the stage March 16th and dropped some pretty significant announcements. The Blackwell Ultra chip coming late 2025, the Vera Rubin chip launching this year, and he's talking about the company hitting $1 trillion in data center revenue by 2028. Pretty compelling vision for the future, right? But here's where it gets interesting — the stock tanked 14% in the month after the event wrapped.

Turns out this isn't new. Over the past five years, Nvidia has fallen 88% of the time in the 30 days following GTC, dropping an average of 7%. That's a pretty compelling pattern if you're looking for reasons to avoid buying before the conference. Except... there's a flip side everyone ignores.

The stock actually rose 63% of the time in the 30 days *leading up* to the event, gaining about 7% on average. So we're basically seeing people buy the rumor, then sell the news. It's the classic setup. You get this compelling run-up as hype builds, then reality hits and people take profits. The real takeaway? Trying to time the next few weeks around these events is basically a coin flip.

But here's the thing — and this is where I think there's a compelling long-term argument — Nvidia's actual business results tell a different story. Over the past decade, revenue is up 5,120%, net income up 20,550%, and the stock itself up 21,800%. Those aren't typos. Even people who bought years after the initial run have crushed it with one-year, three-year, and five-year returns that beat the market.

Huang seems to genuinely believe we're at an inflection point with AI. He's talking about agentic AI systems that go way beyond simple chatbots — stuff that can set goals, handle complex multi-step problems, minimal human involvement. And companies are throwing hundreds of billions into capex to make this happen. That's real money flowing into infrastructure, which translates to Nvidia revenue.

So the compelling case isn't about whether to buy before March 19 or after. It's about whether you believe in the AI trend at all. Because if you do, holding Nvidia for years beats trying to squeeze out a few percentage points on short-term trades around conferences. At 22x forward earnings, I'd say it's worth considering as a long-term position. The data suggests that's where the real money gets made.