Last year, an old friend sent me a message that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
He’s a good sport about it. What he doesn’t know is the part of the story I’ve never told anyone: I didn’t just recommend NVIDIA. I bought it. Then I was forced to sell it.
Not because the thesis broke. Not because I panicked. Because I moved countries.
This blog tells that story — the receipts are real and slightly embarrassing — but it isn’t really about picking a winner. It’s about ownership, and why the NVIDIA tokenized stock you can buy today solves a problem that quietly cost me a fortune.
The kid with the screwdriver
Long before I touched a stock or a satoshi, I was a 13-year-old in Nijmegen taking apart PCs for fun. I’d strip a tower down to the motherboard, spread the parts across the floor, and rebuild it — mostly to see if I could, partly to squeeze out a few more frames per second.
Inside my tower back in 2001 sat a GeForce 3. If you were a gamer in that era, you know: that card was the thing. I wasn’t just playing on it either — I was world-ranked in Serious Sam, a game that existed basically to show off what cards like that could do.
So no, I didn’t discover NVIDIA in a stock screener. I discovered it with a screwdriver, fourteen years before I bought a single share. Peter Lynch calls it “buy what you know.” I just called it my bedroom.
2015: the poker grinder buys a chip company
By 2015 I was a full-time professional poker player in the Netherlands, grinding 70,000 to 100,000 hands a month. Poker rewires how you think about money. You stop betting on feelings and start betting on edges — expected value, bankroll, position.
Between sessions, I kept coming back to one company. Gaming was paying NVIDIA’s bills, but the interesting part was everything else: datacenters, deep learning, cars that could see. The market was pricing a graphics card company. I saw a computing company that happened to sell graphics cards.
So I bought the stock. Then I did what any friend would do — I told people about it. Including the friend from the screenshot above, who, in his own words, did neither.
2016: the thesis document (yes, I still have it)
By May 2016 the stock had doubled since my buy, and everyone around me thought I was wrong to still be holding. Not random people either — two of my friends worked as analysts at hedge funds, and both told me the same thing: overvalued. A 38 P/E for a graphics card company? Take the profit.
So I did something slightly obsessive. I sat down and wrote a full research document — balance sheet, revenue per division, ratios, competitive risks, the works. Not to convince anyone else. To check myself. When every smart person you know disagrees with you, there are only two possibilities: either you see something they don’t, or you’re missing something they see. Poker taught me that “everyone disagrees with me” is not information about who’s right. Writing it all down was my way of finding out which one it was.
The document confirmed what my gut said: the market was valuing a gaming company, and I was holding a computing company. I kept the shares — and I sent the doc to my friend from the screenshot, one more attempt to drag him in.
Here’s the metadata, because on the internet nothing happened without receipts:
Look at the “last saved by” field. The document literally lived on his computer. He opened it. And he saved it. But he still didn’t buy. I love him for it.
At the time of writing, NVIDIA traded at $44.40. The five-year chart in my doc looked like the stock had already run too far:
Adjusted for the stock splits that came later, that $44.40 works out to about $1.11 per share in today’s terms. Hold that number — it hurts more later.
The forced exit
A few months after writing that document, I left the Netherlands for good. New chapter: Chiang Mai, and eventually the company you’re reading this on.
My broker had other plans for my portfolio. I never even told them I’d left — the moment I deregistered from the Netherlands, they got an automatic notification from the system. No email asking me to update my details. Without a request to redo KYC. No “would you like to transfer your positions elsewhere?” They just flat out closed the account. Everything in it had to go, including my entire NVIDIA position — the one I’d written a whole thesis on. Sold, not by choice but by paperwork I didn’t even know was moving. One day the shares were simply gone, and the money sat in my bank account like nothing had happened.
(I’d show you the bank statement as a receipt, but that account is gone too. In 2021 I transferred crypto profits home to buy a house, and the bank responded with a 30-page compliance questionnaire. I politely declined the homework. They politely closed my account. That makes it one of five or six bank accounts I’ve lost over the years for the crime of touching crypto — the traditional financial system and I have history.)
I walked away from the NVIDIA sale with a modest profit. Enough for a few months of rent in Chiang Mai, not enough to change a life. In split-adjusted terms, I sold the future king of the AI era at roughly one dollar per share.
Today NVIDIA trades around $200. Run that math on what I was forced to sell: every $10,000 that left my account in 2016 would be worth roughly $1.8 million now. A 180x–190x, gone — not because I got the call wrong, but because a form asked where I lived.
Sit with the absurdity of that for a second. This was a company I’d loved since I was a teenager with a screwdriver. Its hardware had literally passed through my hands. My thesis was written, stress-tested against two hedge fund analysts who said sell, and held with conviction when holding was the hard thing to do. Every part of investing you’re supposed to get right, I got right.
None of it mattered. A database noticed I’d moved, and a broker sold my conviction without asking me a single question. That’s when it clicked: the system isn’t built for people who live outside the box — it’s built to keep you inside one. Stay in your country, use your approved broker, match the form, and you may participate. Step outside, and your access gets revoked like a subscription you forgot to cancel.
Ten years locked out
Here’s the part that stuck with me longer than the sale itself: I couldn’t buy it back.
As a digital nomad, I didn’t fit anyone’s form. Brokers want a residency, a tax number, a utility bill from a country you actually live in. For years my honest answer to “where do you live?” was “it depends on the month.” Great for life. Terrible for KYC at a stock broker.
Meanwhile I could buy any cryptocurrency on the planet in thirty seconds. Bitcoin, obscure altcoins, tokens that didn’t exist last Tuesday — no problem. One share of the company I’d held in my hands as a teenager and written a thesis on as an adult? Computer says no.
So NVIDIA lived in the back of my mind for a decade while it went up roughly 180x from my forced exit. Every earnings report was a small paper cut.
The lesson isn’t “buy winners”
I want to be careful with the takeaway here, because the obvious one is wrong.
Looking back, I don’t regret that my stocks were sold. I regret having no choice. My broker decided I could no longer hold the shares after I emigrated.
Traditional investing assumes you’ll always fit neatly inside one country’s financial system. My experience showed me that isn’t always true. People emigrate, go nomad, live between countries, get caught between systems. The moment your life stops matching the form, your access to ownership gets revoked — even when your thesis is dead right.
That’s the real story. Not “I picked a winner.” Rather: I picked a winner and the system’s plumbing took it away from me anyway.
The NVIDIA tokenized stock solves my exact problem
Today, tokenized stocks are solving exactly that problem.
A NVIDIA tokenized stock is a token — on-chain, in your wallet — that tracks the price of the real NVDA share. No residency-bound brokerage account. No utility bill. You hold it the same way you hold your crypto, fund it with the stablecoins you already have, and trade it around the clock instead of within Wall Street’s opening hours.
The 2016 version of me, freshly kicked out of his brokerage account in a Chiang Mai coffee shop, needed exactly this. The 2026 version of me can finally use it: the NVIDIA tokenized stock trades today on exchanges like Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid, right next to the crypto pairs.
If you want the step-by-step version — funding, choosing a platform, what to watch out for — I broke the whole process down in my guide on how to buy stocks with crypto.
Is it a perfect replacement for owning shares through a broker? Not yet — you’re typically holding price exposure, not voting rights, and you should understand who issues the token. For someone whose problem was never “which stock” but “which country,” it’s the difference between watching and participating.
One page from the original thesis
Since we’re in full time-capsule mode, here’s an actual page from the 2016 document, highlighter and all. People love old predictions, so let’s grade mine honestly:
- Datacenters and AI: the doc flags deep learning as “a new computing method for enabling artificial intelligence” and calls datacenters the division with “much room for growth.” In 2016 that was a footnote in NVIDIA’s earnings. It became the entire story.
- Self-driving cars: “They will use the tools of deep learning to sense their environment, ultimately driving themselves.” Slower than expected, but directionally right — and NVIDIA is at the center of it.
- Gaming: “I do feel like the gaming industry growth will stop at some point.” Half right. Gaming kept growing, it just stopped mattering — it went from NVIDIA’s whole identity to a side business.
- The misses: I worried a 38 P/E was “not something Buffett would invest in,” and I feared AMD’s next card launch. The naive parts are staying in. A cleaned-up prediction is a fake prediction.
One thing the document never mentions: cryptocurrency. Not once. In my defense, I was busy stacking that separately — my first Bitcoin buy was in 2013, at $44. Which means my two best calls of the decade were both made at exactly $44. I don’t know what that means either, but I’m keeping it.
And since we’re digging through the past anyway: the story of what I built right after that forced sale — the flight to Chiang Mai, the first ICO client, the first mass airdrop contract on Ethereum — is all in the AirdropAlert origin story.
Final Words
Ten years ago I couldn’t hold one share of NVIDIA because a form said so. Today I could buy the NVIDIA tokenized stock from a beach in Mexico with USDT before this paragraph ends. Whatever you think of any individual token or platform, that shift — ownership that travels with you instead of your postcode — is real, and it’s one of the quiet wins of this industry.
My friend replied to me again last year, by the way:
He still has the analysis. This time, mate, there’s no excuse — tokenized stocks made it tradeable anytime, anywhere.
Everyone has “the one that got away.”
Mine just isn’t a girl. It’s a ticker.
If you enjoyed this one, jump into the rest of our trading blogs and keep building the process.
As always, don’t forget to claim your bonus on Bybit below. See you next time!
FAQ
Where can I buy the NVIDIA tokenized stock? Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid all list the NVIDIA tokenized stock alongside their regular crypto markets. The full walkthrough is in my how to buy stocks with crypto guide.
What was NVIDIA’s stock price in 2016? Around $44 in May 2016. After the 4-for-1 split in 2021 and the 10-for-1 split in 2024, that equals roughly $1.11 per share in today’s split-adjusted terms. NVIDIA trades around $200 in July 2026.
Can you buy stocks without a brokerage account? Through tokenized stocks, yes. These are on-chain tokens that track real equities and trade on crypto exchanges, so you don’t need a country-bound brokerage account.
Can digital nomads buy US stocks? Traditional brokers usually require proof of residency, which is exactly the problem I ran into for a decade. A tokenized stock removes that requirement, since you only need a crypto exchange account or a wallet.
Does a NVIDIA tokenized stock give you real share ownership? Generally you get price exposure rather than direct shareholder rights like voting. Always check who issues the token and how it’s backed before buying.
WRITTEN BY
Morten ChristensenFounder, AirdropAlert
Crypto class of ’13, airdrop farmer since 2016. Avid trader and DeFi veteran. His market commentary has been featured by Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, and CNN.
Credit: Source link
