Alpha Sprint: first monthly update —
both Hold ratings hold

The first monthly updates are in. Both ratings are unchanged from initiation — Hold on COIN, Hold on NVDA — but the underlying work has sharpened considerably. Chang is navigating legal overhang and muted momentum signals heading into a binary earnings event. Alice is watching a technically strong name weather sentiment-driven selling while positioning for what May reveals about enterprise AI spending.

With earnings for both names landing within three weeks of each other, this is an unusually compressed catalyst window. The question isn't whether the theses were right in April — it's whether they'll survive contact with the numbers.

Chang Liu on Coinbase ($COIN) — Hold

COIN pulled back roughly 8% this week, sliding from a local high of $210 to close near $188 and giving back most of the prior week's recovery gains. Two headwinds drove the move: the New York AG's lawsuit alleging that Coinbase runs illegal prediction market gambling operations, and a broader risk-off tone as Bitcoin's Coinbase Premium turned negative — a signal of fading US institutional buying momentum.

Technically, the $188 support level was tested and briefly breached before a modest +3.5% bounce today. RSI sits at a neutral 49 and volume is running well below 30-day averages, suggesting the market lacks conviction in either direction. Chang is watching the $165–$210 range as the likely holding pattern until the print.

On the legal front, the NY AG lawsuit remains an active overhang with no resolution in sight. Coinbase's legal team has publicly argued that prediction markets are not gambling and expects the Supreme Court to ultimately agree — but near-term sentiment pressure from the headline risk is real and likely to persist. Separately, Coinbase announced it will delist Ethereum-based DAI starting May 4, converting remaining balances to USDS 1:1. Chang reads this as a minor operational move, but notes it signals the company is actively streamlining its stablecoin exposure ahead of earnings.

Q1 2026 earnings are due May 7 after market close. Revenue consensus sits at $1.56B, a bar that has already been reset lower after last quarter's guidance miss — which could set up a positive surprise if execution holds. Chang maintains his Hold: the thesis is intact, but he's not willing to move without seeing what the print actually says.

Alice Li on Nvidia ($NVDA) — Hold

NVDA pulled back roughly 7% from its April 27 all-time high of $216 to $201, pressured by two sentiment-driven catalysts: a WSJ report that OpenAI missed internal user and revenue targets (raising concerns about downstream AI spending), and confirmation that China is blocking H200 chip purchases — effectively zeroing out that revenue stream.

Alice's read is that the selloff is sentiment-driven, not fundamental. The daily chart structure remains constructive: price holds well above its 50, 100, and 200-day moving averages, and the broader uptrend from the April 2025 lows is intact. The underlying demand thesis hasn't cracked — Goldman Sachs reiterates a Buy with a $250 price target, and hyperscaler commitments remain robust, with AWS on the hook for 1 million NVIDIA GPUs through 2027. Data center revenue grew 73% year-over-year last quarter, and forward guidance remains well above Street expectations.

She's watching options positioning as a leading indicator, noting it has been growing more bullish — a signal she interprets as institutional money quietly positioning ahead of the May 20 earnings print. Until that catalyst resolves, her view is that the ambiguity in the setup justifies staying on the sidelines. She maintains her Hold.

What to watch

The May updates will be different in character from this one. Rather than reading the tape, Chang and Alice will need to evaluate what the actual numbers tell them — and whether their pre-earnings frameworks still hold. That's the harder work, and it's what the Alpha Sprint is designed to develop.

We'll be publishing their post-earnings updates here in the Dispatch as the sprint continues. Follow along on LinkedIn for the week-to-week notes between issues.