My mom doesn’t always talk about a single stock, but when she does, I know it’s been making headlines. When my mother-in-law asks about the same stock, I know it’s been making millionaires.

Nvidia has everyone’s attention of late, as its stock price exploded upwards to become the 3rd largest company in the world. In a period of 18 months, it surpassed companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Tesla in market cap.

Like most overnight successes, Nvidia is neither young nor inexperienced. The chipmaker came public in 1999 amid a slew of other companies during the tech craze. Unsurprisingly, the stock stumbled out of the gate like so many others during the time. Investors in its 1999 IPO went through 15 years of investing hell before the stock really began to move, take a look:

That’s not to say the company was complacent. During that time Jensen Huang and co. built new programming software (CUDA), incredibly powerful chips (RTX and GTX lines) and infrastructure (data centers, LaunchPad) that would eventually give them a 10-year head start on competitors.

Building companies with enormous potential often requires continuous reinvestment of earnings into R&D, personnel and infrastructure.

On the surface, it can be hard to identify a company’s progress. Laws of growth investing aren’t much different than laws of nature; for example, a Chinese Bamboo tree grows often grows for 5 years underneath the soil before it’s shoots explode 90 feet in the air over five subsequent weeks.

Today, Nvidia is the undisputed backbone for companies in quantum computing and artificial intelligence. And it’s earnings estimates have grown faster than the stock price, if you can believe it.

Back to the title question: there’s an expression in finance that says, “trees don’t grow to the sky”, which means everything has limitations, be it a company’s earnings or valuation.

While impossible to predict the future, I don’t think we’ll see Nvidia’s market cap grow another 100x (that would make it a $200 trillion dollar company, twice the size of the global economy). The stock is already in rarified air, alongside some of the most powerful businesses in the world. It’s up to Nvidia’s earnings to prove that it belongs there.

If market (and nature) have taught us anything, its that everything goes through a period of pruning in order to continue growing. It wouldn’t be surprising to see growth stocks’ prices flatline for a bit, or even consolidate lower while earnings roll in.

This isn’t investment advice, but personally I’ve done some trimming on my own Nvidia position. Taking profits after a massive run isn’t always a bad idea.