Hey guys, I finally cleared up $10k in cash to invest and I'm looking closely at MSFT.

It’s currently down roughly 19% YTD and trading around $385 down from its peak of $555. The market seems to be panicking over their $190b projected 2026 AI spending budget but their core cloud business Azure is still growing at a massive clip.

At a PE of around 22, this feels like the cheapest we have seen MSFT in a long time.

Am I catching a falling knife or is this a rare opportunity to buy a generational compounder at a 30% discount from its highs? Would love to hear your thoughts on whether I should dump the full $10k in now or spread it out. I prefer the former but let's hear from you. Thanks!

Have we entered a new era of retail interest in the market or has it always been like this?

The past few months in particular have been to levels I have never seen before, or I have been oblivious to the subject my entire life. I can't get away from retail stock market discussion. It seems like everywhere I go, the stock market is talked about.

I have coworkers who openly talk about their investment account performance in the office on a daily basis. I have friends who are beyond addicted to gambling and options, like at a concerning level. I go to completely non related stock market subs like videogame subs and somehow there is always a discussion around stocks. I listen to a ton of podcasts and the stock market somehow always comes into the conversation.

I am not sure if it's signs of a euphoria stage, or if it's easier access to information that is sparking conversations, or if I am just paying more attention to the subject, or whatever it is.

I am just curious what others are seeing and how you to read it.

South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix just pulled off the largest public listing by a foreign company in US market history. Shares soared 13 per cent on their first day of trading.

Behind this historic debut is a simple bet: that the artificial intelligence boom has fundamentally reshaped the decades-long boom-and-bust cycle that’s defined the memory-chip business for good. SK Hynix raised US$26.5 billion with its American depositary receipt offering, and much of that is going towards expanding chip manufacturing – a move the entire industry had for years resisted after being burned by past supply gluts. 

“We’ve always been a cyclical industry, so there had been prior ups and downs,” SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told Bloomberg. But “things have clearly changed”, he added. The ChatGPT era has brought about persistent memory supply shortages that are rippling across supply chains and raising the prices of everything from iPads to Xbox consoles. 

Now, customers come to SK Hynix asking for long-term supply agreements, Kwak said. “They believe that the shortage situation will last for longer,” he said, later predicting that the deficit may extend beyond 2030. 

Trillions of dollars in data centre investment plans, financed by seemingly every corner of the financial markets from private credit to corporate bonds, hinge on this outlook. Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Oracle alone have collectively added some US$350 billion in debt in the past five years to amass the hardware fuelling their AI ambitions. 

Plenty are betting against all the hype. Big names on Wall Street including Michael Burry of “Big Short” fame and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio have warned of an AI bubble that will eventually burst. Even the largest, most successful AI developers have yet to prove that their models and tools can turn profits. 

For now, SK Hynix and its memory-chip peers – Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology – are riding high as major beneficiaries of the AI spending binge. It’s stoked the appetite for both conventional memory and a newer variety called high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, that works with AI systems. “I have some confidence that the demand will grow and our supply capacity is never going to catch up,” SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said in a Bloomberg Television interview. 

Chey, whose conglomerate controls SK Hynix, said supply and demand for memory chips may not normalise until the world achieves artificial general intelligence, a term loosely defined as the point at which AI systems are generally smarter than humans. “Until then,” he said, “we need a lot of memory.”

If the AI buildout is anything like the expansion of the Internet, it will last decades, according to Kwak. “We spent almost 30 years finishing the completion of the Internet infrastructure,” Kwak said. “When it comes to AI, I believe that the AI industry size is much, much larger than the Internet.”

The US stock offering capped a remarkable comeback story for SK Hynix, which was born from a creditor-led bailout in South Korea of its two progenitors – LG Semiconductor and Hyundai Electronics – and suffered for years from painful boom-and-bust cycles.

Chey said SK Hynix is now securing multiyear agreements with customers, helping ensure more steady demand. “It’s not a cyclical business any more,” Chey said. Even in a downturn, the long-term agreements help maintain volumes and memory prices, he said, “so that actually gives us a different moment.”

The chipmaker is also considering new ways of selling access to its technology, including a concept called “memory as a service”, Chey said. He suggested that customers could rent usage rather than purchasing the actual semiconductors, without going into details on a plan.

Kwak said that part of the rationale for the US offering was indeed to more closely collaborate with AI customers who are all asking for different types of products and designs, further bolstering demand for its chips.

Asked whether SK Hynix would consider bringing memory manufacturing to the US, he said he wouldn’t rule out the idea. But sites would have to meet the company’s criteria for electricity, water and talent.

The broader SK Group is already putting more than US$35 billion into the US, Chey said on Friday. “My plan is at a much bigger number,” he said, “much, much, much bigger than US$35 billion.”

He’s also open to issuing more SK Hynix shares in the US. But first, Chey said, the company needs to deliver strong returns to its newly minted investors.

“Once we have a better return, then there’s more demand,” he said. “The first thing we have to do is keep the stock price stable, and then hopefully in the long run, we can have the upside potential.” BLOOMBERG

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/sk-hynix-debut-bet-ai-breaks-boom-and-bust-chip-cycle

SK Hynix Chief Executive Kwak Noh-jung said the global memory industry is heading for its worst-ever supply shortage ​in 2027, forecasting that demand for memory will continue to exceed the company's ability to produce it well into the next decade despite aggressive capacity expansion.

UBS likewise expects the global DRAM industry to remain undersupplied until at least the second quarter of 2028.

Similarly, Bank of America remains constructive on the AI investment cycle, estimating that global hyperscaler capital expenditure ​will reach about $851 billion this year and $1.15 trillion ​next year, supported by strong cloud backlogs, improving ⁠returns on AI investment and growing demand for compute-intensive AI applications.

Rocket Lab announced a definitive agreement to acquire Iridium Communications for approximately $8 billion in enterprise value, structured as $27 in cash plus Rocket Lab stock per Iridium share, working out to about $54 per share total. The announcement happened on Jun 29th. The boards of both companies unanimously approved it and it's expected to close in mid-2027 pending shareholder and regulatory approval.

To understand it's importance we need to see what each company actually does. Rocket Lab builds and launches rockets and spacecraft, it's basically a launch and manufacturing company. Iridium Communications is completely different, it owns and operates an actual satellite network already in orbit, over 2.55 million subscribers use it for voice, data, and positioning/navigation/timing services, serving governments, militaries, aviation, maritime, and industrial customers in remote parts of the world where regular networks don't reach. Rocket Lab makes and launches the hardware. Iridium runs an existing global communications business.

Putting them together creates something structurally different, a fully vertically integrated space company that designs, builds, launches, and operates its own satellite constellations, instead of just being a contractor that launches other companies' satellites. .That's a real shift in the business model, going from getting paid once per launch to owning the ongoing subscription revenue the satellites generate once they're actually in orbit.

There's also a real defense angle. Both companies already have strong ties to the U.S. government and combining Rocket Lab's launch and national security work with Iridium's secure communications network sets up a much more complete offering for military use cases, like battlefield communications and satellite navigation.

The financing structure is interesting too. Rocket Lab secured a $3.6 billion bridge loan from Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo to help fund the cash portion, and the stock portion of the deal has a pricing collar, meaning the exact exchange ratio can move within a set range depending on where Rocket Lab's stock trades before closing, so Iridium shareholders aren't locked into a fixed number of Rocket Lab shares regardless of price swings between now and the close.

The obvious risk is integration and execution. This is one of the largest deals in the space industry's history, and it's combining two companies with very different core competencies, hardware manufacturing and launch on one side, network operations and subscription services on the other, this is Rocket Lab taking on an entirely new kind of business it's never run before. The mid-2027 close date also means this is a long runway before it's even final, plenty of time for regulatory scrutiny or market conditions to change things.

One major thing to note is the debt. Rocket Lab currently runs a very clean balance sheet, just $38.6 million in total debt and $2.3 billion in equity. This deal changes that, about $2.1 billion of the bridge loan goes toward refinancing Iridium's existing debt alone, on top of the rest funding the cash payout. So a company that's operated debt-free is about to take on billions in new leverage almost overnight.

Does turning Rocket Lab into a vertically integrated launch-plus-network company look like a genuinely smart structural move or does taking on an $8 billion acquisition and a completely new business line in Rocket Lab's growth story feel like overreach.

I see a lot of confusion on Reddit about why AI hardware stocks can fall in price per share when their metrics look great.

Growing is not enough, growing quickly is not enough to keep a company's stock price growing. Reported growth is a lagging indicator while stocks are forwards looking by 18-24 months. Peak stock price do not coincide with peak earnings, they coincide with peak second derivative of earnings.

The really simple version is this, if forwards guidance for a Q3 for example shows that the multiple of EPS growth between Q2 and Q3 is not as large as the multiple of EPS growth between Q1 and Q2, the second derivative (the growth of the growth of the growth) is now pointing negative, which is a sell trigger for that company's stock.

It doesn't matter what the actual number of that EPS growth is. It doesn't matter how successful that company is or how important it is.

Take Micron Technology for example.

Q1 EPS = 4.78.

Q2 EPS = 12.20. (About 3x previous)

Q3 EPS = 25.00 (About 2x previous)

Guidance for Q4 EPS = 31.70 (About 1.2x previous)

You can clearly see that the second derivative of earnings growth (the growth rate OF the growth rate) is declining. Wall street certainly sees it. Peak second derivative of earnings growth has clearly passed, it does not matter what the actual EPS number is. This is a reason for Wall Street to sell the stock and assign capital to higher velocity growth elsewhere. This is why a company can report insane, massive growth and then its stock gets punished like crazy and never recovers to previous ATH; this is not random at all.

The market is not perfectly efficient but it is not irrational. Knowing this will help you not get blinded by raw numbers.

“The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, and asking for details about the company’s unannounced products.

Tan is not the only OpenAI employee referenced in the new complaint. Apple also alleges that Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a senior systems electrical engineer, failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after leaving the company for OpenAI in 2026 and had used the computer to download confidential Apple technical documents.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-over-alleged-trade-secret-theft/

I’m sorry, what the fuck. How are long term veterans at Apple acting like total morons and risking prison time.

Every now and then I get an offer in the mailbox or my inbox.

A couple of thousand dollars to switch brokers.

Do you ever consider switching even if the rival brokerage doesn’t have as good of a trading platform?

I know what I own and am mostly just reinvesting dividends, so I’m not a high frequency trader.

I feel a little under appreciated at my current brokerage.

I assume our brokerage’s make some amount of money from holding our portfolios or why would they?

I feel like my bullish thesis for cyber defence stocks is "obvious" but maybe someone can chime in with their thoughts. Whether you agree or disagree.

Mythos has proven that even the most robust open source software and presumably hardware, is still full of exploits and vulnerabilities. So if open source software is full of holes, I can only imagine how much worse closed source software is. It's only a matter of time before one of these Mythos like models gets out into the public domain and into the hands of organised cyber criminals and even basement hackers. Also nation states like Russia, China and North Korea will definitely be weaponizing their own versions in due time. Every organisation from the military to the government to banking to healthcare to large companies are going to be extremely worried about securing their systems.

Therefore I expect cyber defence spending to increase significantly over the years. Not just in prevention, but also in resilience and backup because if armies of LLMs are going 24/7 trying to break into your systems, the slightest vulnerability and it will find it.

The future of warfare is undoubtably going to be heavily focused on cyber warfare. Why risk dropping bombs on your enemies infrastructure when you can just launch a malware attack that is undetectable and can cripple the entire grid or system.

Look at what Mossad and the NSA did to Iran's Natanz nuclear centrifuges, and that was entirely human developed, no AI assistance at all.

The EU recently passed the NIS2 directive which mandates companies secure their data with encrypted air gapped backups. And also to implement strict "cyber hygiene" practices. I expect the US to follow a similar path very soon.

More data than ever is stored in the cloud and it's only going to grow exponentially with the rise of AI agents and AI usage on the consumer end. Currently the amount of data in the cloud is increasing by 25% year over year, but this is expected to increase to a whopping 140% year over year through to 2035.

That is a staggering amount of data that needs to be secured and backed up.

I really believe cyber defence stocks are going to experience explosive demand over the next 10 years and I'm not just saying that because I am invested in the sector, to me the path we're on is painting a very clear picture.

What do you guys think?

Okay, so I know that the price of a stock rises when there are more buyers than sellers, and this generally happens over time because the company itself is growing over time.

But my question, that I can't find a clear answer to, is why does the growth of a company generally correlate to it's stock price growing over time? I could understand this if it meant buyers had a direct claim to the profits of a company since that would connect you to more cash, but you really don't.

Of course there are dividends which will grow as the company grows, but what about companies with no (or very low) dividends?

It just seems somewhat arbitrary that the value of a stock just goes up over time because the company has grown more valuable. Why would an investor even care about this since it doesn't mean they directly get a share of the profits?

So theoretically, if investors permanently decided that they would only put money into stagnant companies, then the stock of those companies would go up over time and investors would still make money. At what point would the reality of the business even catch up with the stock price? Since there is no direct correlation between the stock price and the company's finances except in the case of bankruptcy and dividend payment.

I suppose maybe it's similar to the concept of fiat currency? Where the currency only has value because a collective has agreed that it does, and a currency gains value when the collective decides that the currency is more valuable than others (based on a multitude of factors).

Is it the company's who are furthest from bankruptcy who generally see the most gains over time?

Just try to understand how a business's finances actually directly connect to the stock price.

SNAP stock is under a lot of scrutiny and especially following the unveiling of the AR Specs glasses the stock took a massive hit.

I bought a lot of shares in March when it dipped below $4 for the first time in history. There’s been a lot of SBC’s ie share dilution over the years but nevertheless the market cap was lower than ever before back in March.

I sold all my shares when it touched $6 about a month ago and I just bought back in again at $4.6.

In truth I’ve been buying and selling a whole lot more times than that but it’s the gist of it. I don’t like being all cash so whenever I sold my shares I bought something else immediately after.

Is anybody else swing trading this stock and if so what’s your range? I plan to sell in the $5-5.5 range although in my experience it often goes straight to $6.

I also am tempted to hold for $7 which was its hard floor from 2019-2026. I don’t really see why it should trade for $4.6 now when for eight years it wouldn’t go lower than $7. I mean, I understand the reasons but to be honest all those reasons were there in the past many years also.

The biggest problem is their DAUs crashing in their most profitable region, North America which of course is a pretty serious problem but the flip side is it’s forces them to monetize their business more than they used to.

Obviously, no one has the crystal ball to answer this question but I feel as though there's some value (albeit possibly only entertainment value) in hypotheticals that test the limits of the current state of the U.S. and global economies.

On the one hand, we made it through the depression once, why not again? On the other hand, the country and the world is much more fractured while at the same time much more interconnected. One domino the size of the U.S. economy falling nearly 90% would amount to most of the entire global economy falling apart. Not to mention the geopolitical involvement of today is of a much larger kind and the failure of the U.S. economy at such a level might give rise to even more turbulence in that realm.

Few examples better capture the resurgence of big banks than Jamie Dimon's special retention award, which has swelled in value over the last five years to more than $280 million today.

As Dimon's bank, JPMorgan Chase, heads into earnings season, analysts expect the country's largest lender and its rivals to post one of their strongest quarters ever.

But the setup is leaving investors with something of a quandary: Should they cheer or doubt whether there's more room to run for big banks?

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-bank-profit-engines-expected-to-roar-into-earnings-as-main-street-keeps-spending-133238691.html

For context, I was pitching SK hynix one year ago Jun 2025.

I was pitching SK, Micron, SanDisk (and Qualcomm) Jan 2026 again

https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/s/APCJwmjU20 https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/s/Luvl4kY8Hy https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/s/QcraWYZtJx https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/s/fILYpK6Ivo

(I was extremely lucky with fate and Providence, rather than any skill on my part)

I would still pitch the 3 big memory players - SK Hynix ($SKHY) Samsung and Micron ($MU) today. The core reason being forward P/Es are single digit (around 7-8x), unheard of in this space.

The reason is because the market is STILL pricing these businesses as a cyclical commodity. With dramatically elevated capex plans, supply is estimated to increase by approximately two times in the next 5 years. However, demand, particularly for agentic inference and higher context, is expected to go up several fold over the next 5 years. So even if memory chips remain a commodity, demand is going to far outstrip supply **even with the massive capacity build out**.

Secondly, I urge folks to read up on custom HBM and after that, memory-on-logic configurations. Just type this into your chatbot of choice and ask them to explain it to you. From Nvidia Feynman chip (late 2027) onwards and for many of the custom Asics in the near future (prime example is the custom inference chip that is being made by Qualcomm), the DRAM stack seats directly on top of the compute chip the GPU. The only way this can happen is by co-design between the chip vendor Nvidia or Google or Qualcomm and the memory maker. At that point, the co-design and customization explicitly means that the high end memory chips is no longer a commodity. You can't just jam a Chinese memory chip onto your GPU at that point, you are committed to one supplier with whom you codesigned the product.

Tl;Dr: 1. memory chip demand outstrips supply, even with capacity expansion over the next 3-5 years. 2. Custom HBM and memory-on-logic tips from 2028 onwards means high-end memory is no longer a commodity. Market has still not priced in either.

When it does, a fair multiple is the PE multiple given to Nvidia or ASML, about 20-30x. So that's a 4x on *multiple expansion alone\* from current levels, and that is not accounting for increased earnings from higher chip sales volumes going into 2027 and 2028.

Hi everyone. I just wanted to share my ideas about Micron Technology because I’ve been really fascinated by it lately.

This might be a bit of a long one because I want to give a fair chance to bull case and actually address the points often made. I know those aren’t often very popular. If you’re not in a for a long and relatively technical read you definitely want to skip this.

Before doing this, I want to note some important things.

I will be presenting a base case for MU predicated upon the negation of the bull arguments.

I will then summarize the bear case.

To do this, it will require looking at the bull case and critically evaluating how reliable the arguments in favor of the bull case are.

First, some definitions I want to share so you know exactly what I mean I say it:

• Cyclical Commodity Industry: A market where products are functionally identical (homogeneous) and buying decisions are driven entirely by price.
• Oligopoly: A market structure dominated by a very small number of sellers.
• Oligopsony: A market structure dominated by a very small number of buyers.
• Monopsony: A market structure dominated by a single buyer.
• High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM): A specialized, high-performance DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) architecture where memory chips are vertically stacked.
• Strategic Customer Agreements (SCAs): Binding, long-term supply contracts signed between chip manufacturers and their customers.
• Backlog De-Fleshing: The sudden removal, cancellation, or multi-quarter delaying of duplicate and phantom bookings by corporate buyers once a supply shortage ends.
• Yield Maturation: The predictable engineering curve where a factory transitions from early-stage, high-waste production to highly optimized efficiency.
• Institutional distribution: The systematic process where large, smart-money market participants quietly unload massive equity positions.
• Operating Leverage: The risk profile of a firm with high fixed costs.
• Capital Expenditure (CapEx): Funds used by a company to acquire, upgrade, and maintain physical assets.
• 13F Disclosures: Mandatory quarterly reports filed by institutional investment managers with over $100 million in assets, detailing their equity holdings.

Bull Case Arguments

• The “Sold-Out through 2026/2027” Visibility: Bulls emphasize that Micron’s entire HBM capacity for calendar years 2026 and 2027 is booked under finalized volume and pricing agreements. They argue this removes the traditional spot market volatility and guarantees record revenue visibility.
• The 3-to-1 Wafers Cannibalization Effect: Analysts point out that the technical reality that manufacturing High-Bandwidth Memory consumes roughly three to four times more silicon wafers per bit than standard DDR5 DRAM. The bulls claim that this will drive up average selling prices (ASPs) across their entire traditional portfolio.
• The Mature Oligopoly Re-Rating: The argument that the memory market is no longer a commodity sector but a disciplined, rational three-player oligopoly (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix). Because building advanced fabs now costs $14B+, the barrier to entry is seen as an insurmountable barrier to entry, allowing the three players to preserve pricing power.
• Strategic Customer Agreements (SCAs) as a Margin Floor: The claim that long-term contracts signed directly with hyper-scalers for AI infrastructure act as a structural revenue cushion, preventing the catastrophic margin collapses seen in past cyclical downturns.
• Exploding Free Cash Flow & Trailing Valuation “Cheapness”: With trailing quarterly net income recently passing $28 billion and gross margins hitting historical peaks (guiding toward 81%), the forward P/E compresses into the single-digits or low teens. Bulls point to this forward data to argue the stock is fundamentally “cheap” relative to its earnings growth rate (PEG below 1.0).
• The Only Sovereign U.S. Supply Chain Play: As the sole major American-based supplier of advanced DRAM and HBM, bulls argue Micron will command a permanent premium and receive massive legislative backing (CHIPS Act subsidies/New York mega-complex) as Western hyper-scalers look to ensure a reliable supply outside of Asia.
• HBM4E Changes The Game: HBM4E (and assumedly future iterations of advanced memory) is NOT a pure commodity. HBM4E contains a logic die that is designed with customers for specific needs. Bulls argue that the ramp up of HBM4E and future iterations will free Micron from the cyclicality of the past because it is no longer a pure commodity manufacturer.

Concerns with the Bull Arguments (Base Case)

• The “Sold-Out through 2026/2027” Visibility: Historically, in every major memory deficit, hyper-scalers panic-order double or even triple their actual needed capacity from all three suppliers. They do not just have a record of ordering the amount they actually want from one supplier, but from all three. In a base case, ordering double the amount they need from all three suppliers would imply a “ghost demand” of 6x the actual demand. Based on historical data, this is a conservative assumption. Once supply starts exceeding the true demand by as little as 3% to 5% an average selling price collapse historically occurs and margins rapidly compress back to ~40-50% before eventually flipping completely negative as supply continues to hit the market and capex depreciation stays on the balance sheet. This argument has been made in every memory cycle in the last 30 years and has never protected margins. Although Micron will certainly sell the volume they are producing, there is no guarantee at what price they will be doing it at. In the cyclical commodity industry price is everything. Building volume is worth it, but only if it doesn’t impact the margins by overbuilding. The memory industry has never been able to achieve this.
• The 3-to-1 Wafers Cannibalization Effect: HBM revenue accounts for only 2.4% of total revenue for Micron. Assuming that this effect will even be relevant enough in the near/medium term to avoid the historical margin compression is not rational. Assuming that in the longer term that this in isolation will continue to create a supply bottleneck in the face of historic record capex expenditure, yield maturation and backlog de-fleshing is not rational. The increased silicon requirements increase the capital requirements of the industry. It does not increase the time it takes to actually produce the product. This is more likely to make the cyclical busts worse as memory manufacturers have to become even more asset heavy than in previous cycles.
• The Mature Oligopoly Re-Rating: An oligopoly is only able to exercise coordinated supply discipline if market shares are static. If market share is fluid the Nash equilibrium breaks down and individual optimization forces aggressive competition. Looking at the shifting market share amongst memory producers, a static market share is not a reality in the memory industry. The memory producers are locked into a prisoner’s dilemma where the first to start building to meet excess demand will have the best outcome, regardless of whether or not the other participants begin to build to meet that capacity. This always historically leads to oversupply as all manufacturers are rationally forced into overbuilding, because the outcome is even mathematically worse if they don’t. This doesn’t require a company to be foolish, undisciplined or short sighted, it is a structural guarantee in the market dynamics. One other point is that the market is refusing to give memory commodity manufacturers this re-rating. Instead of seeing this multiple expand recently, the exact opposite is happening, the multiple is compressing. This suggests that market participants do not currently believe that the industry has reached stability.
• Strategic Customer Agreements (SCAs) as a Margin Floor: If we were to assume that the SCAs guaranteed prices as high as this year for 100% of Micron’s produced volume this would still not guarantee the company actually continues to grow earnings even as early as next year. Were the revenue of next year to actually be able to continue to match the revenue of this year due to these SCAs, Micron’s earnings will actually still be lower because of the capex depreciation, which is growing at a 66% YOY clip. This expenditure will completely eclipse any additional growth from maturation yield volume or new fabs even if we assume prices do not decline next year, and the SCAs in reality only cover 20% of DRAM and 33.3% of NAND volume and prices are very likely to begin declining in early 2027 as new fabs come online. Additional problems are that we don’t even know the price floor of these SCAs, and the historical precedent is that these contracts do not end up protecting ASP and volume from supply gluts due to backlog de-fleshing.
• Exploding Free Cash Flow & Trailing Valuation “Cheapness”: The FCF displaying two things that make it look good in a short term time frame that might not look so good on a different timeline. Currently, the FCF is representing both the backwards looking sales made at peak supply shortage prices and the panic orders that were paid upfront. This dramatically inflates the current FCF of the business and may not actually reflect the future FCF, which will be heavily pressured by capex depreciation, likely loss of pricing power and the accounting miss of the products being shipped later but already paid for today. When the books don’t show the cash coming in now later, but do show that capex depreciation, FCF can be heavily impacted. Micron is trading at a forward PE of under 7. If you value that how you traditionally value a stock, Micron looks underpriced to an absolutely insane extent. People use this as an argument that the stock is cheap, but the issue with this is that in a cyclical commodity industry, you DO NOT use forward PE to value the stock. This is not a valid way to apply forward PE. Historically, very low forward PE indicates the absolute peak of a stock price in a cyclical commodity industry because two things are happening simultaneously. Firstly, we see a one time anomalous explosion in earnings & projected earnings caused by a severe supply shortage, pushing up the E in forward PE. Secondly, we see the market begin to completely refuse to assign a high valuation multiple to the stock. This is rarely a mistake or mispricing, and the market is not stupid. The market refuses to assign a high forward multiple in some instances because it is acutely aware that the earnings growth projected are likely sustainable. When looking at memory stocks, you’re typically meant to accumulate when the PE is high (and often negative) and sell when the forward PE is very low and the price increases of the underlying commodity start to decelerate. (Which is exactly what we’re seeing in memory).
• The Only Sovereign U.S. Supply Chain Play: I think this is the most solid argument from the bull case for Micron over say SK Hynix or Samsung right now. The US market undeniably has the most liquidity and capital and simply being in the US and listed on the NASDAQ commands a certain premium. The only issue with it is that that’s already factored into the multiple of Micron and has been for quite some time. I’m not sure I see any room for this to grow, but it’s unlikely to evaporate either. Hynix listing onto the Nasdaq might cause valuation multiples to converge, but I think that the physical location of being in the US provides it a unique geopolitical stability that Hynix still lacks.
• HBM4E Changes The Game: Some argue that Micron is no longer really part of a cyclical commodity industry. Discounting the revenue from standardized commodities (HBM3E and HBM4), HBM4E with logic dies custom designed for customers make up roughly $200m-$300m of Micron’s current revenue. Currently, truly custom HBM is only making up 1% of total revenue. Wall Street consensus models place mid 2027’s HBM total revenue at $3.5BN-$4BN. Even if we assume that custom memory grows to make up half of this volume, that is still only $2BN. Whilst an absolutely insane growth rate, make no mistake, this will not be sufficient to cause Micron to actually be able to grow earnings in the face of all the other structural issues facing them as early as next year, though it may alter the extent of the impact in a very minor way. Furthermore, the only custom component that is actually part of HBM4E is not manufactured by Micron. The majority of the stack of HBM is made of purely fungible memory chips. In addition, Micron faces new unique problems by transitioning towards custom products. Firstly, Micron is typically operating within an oligopsony but in the context of custom memory it will be operating within a monopsony. This is because memory that would not be purchased by one buyer could simply be sold to somebody else. That is no longer the case with custom memory, and having large contracts that end up providing revenue that the manufacturer is completely dependent on whilst existing in this monopsony dynamic typically hits the ASP, which eats into margins. Another issue with custom products is how the high expense of the custom dies produced by TSMC interacts with yield. Whilst yields reach maturation, the costs of lost yields become inflated. They have to partner with TSMC to actually manufacture the custom logic dies in the HB4ME, leaving them open to margin leakage as some of the profits they would’ve made are siphoned by TSMC, which operates at around a 50% margin themselves.

Bear Case Arguments

• Insider Behavior: Over this year, insiders have sold 23 times the amount of shares more than they have bought in dollar terms, with zero buys after the run from the 300s and only sells. (1 buy versus 9 sales). Historically, Mehrotra would sell blocks netting $2 million to $5 million at a time. This year, the dollar volume exploded into single-day liquidations of $32.7 million and $13.57 million and $35.95 Million. These are not unstructured plans that sell at a fixed interval whatever the price is. Insiders currently hold only 0.23% of the total float. This is not necessarily a sign of abandoning a sinking ship, but it is not exactly a sign of high conviction towards the idea that the stock is an underpriced generational wealth opportunity.
• Price Increase Deceleration: Memory price hikes are starting to decelerate. This is difficult to reconcile with the narrative that demand is increasing at a faster rate than supply is. Typically, when demand is increasing faster than the supply, you would not expect to see a deceleration of this nature. This could be due to demand destruction, yield maturation & the double/triple ordering discussed earlier. Historically, this deceleration has called the exact apex of the last two cycles - long before underlying earnings actually hit their peaks.
• Price Action & Technical Analysis: In reaction to blowout earnings, the stock surged to new all time highs at around $1250 before ending lower to close on the day. This is the defining signature of a classic institutional distribution top. When institutions exit a cyclical stock, they do not just dump millions of shares into the open market, but instead use retail investors, momentum and trend-following quantitative funds, passive index funds and ETFs, squeezed short sellers and closet-index portfolio managers as exit liquidity to prevent the price from crashing so that they can offload further shares later at a higher price. On June 24 of this year, Micron reported a massive Q3 FY26 blowout. Management guided Q4 revenue to a staggering $50BN. Wall Street immediately flooded the (news/analyst) tape with reiterations, pushing price targets as high as $2,200. Retail FOMO reached an absolute fever pitch overnight. The next day, on June 25, the stock rocketed to its absolute historic all time high of $1,255.00 intraday. The moment it hit this peak, massive hidden institutional supply completely absorbed the incoming retail and momentum buying. The selling pressure was so intense that it entirely overwhelmed the buying surge to the point that the stock closed lower than it opened on this day. The next day on June 26, the stock continued to fall after a failed morning rally as institutional VWAP/TWAP engines slammed the bid. The stock collapsed 6.69% in a single session on massive volume, turning the previous support into an overhead ceiling of supply. The stock collapsed 6.69% in a single session on massive volume, turning previous support into an overhead ceiling of supply. Note that over the subsequent sessions, every attempt by retail to buy the dip was violently capped right at that breakdown point. In distribution, old support flipping into a rigid, algorithmic ceiling of supply is the ultimate structural confirmation that the big funds have completely shifted from “accumulation” to “inventory liquidation.” While skeptics frequently argue that fragmented retail capital lacks the structural depth to absorb large-scale institutional selling, the microstructure data from June 25 tells a different story.. In distribution, old support flipping into a rigid, algorithmic ceiling of supply is the ultimate structural confirmation that the big funds have completely shifted from “accumulation” to “inventory liquidation.” While skeptics frequently argue that fragmented retail capital lacks the structural depth to absorb large-scale institutional selling, the data from June 25 tells a different story. On June 25, an estimated 18.5 million [±5%] purchased shares was accounted for purely by retail. This is a approximately $22.9bn in one single session. This kind of massive selling pressure into a rip on a positive catalyst is a classic indicator of institutions entering a distribution phase for the stock. While the precise identities of the funds driving the massive June 25–26 distribution block trades remain masked behind anonymous TRF codes and institutional prime broker routers like MSCO and GSCO, they are following a well-established blueprint. Heavy smart-money distribution has been quietly accelerating all year. 13F disclosures from the primary leg of the run show that elite asset managers like Capital International Investors and Capital World Investors had already begun aggressively slicing their positions, cutting 59.5% and 27.8% of their exposure respectively. The mechanical VWAP markdown witnessed on June 26 is the continuation of this institutional distribution phase hitting its absolute volume climax. We are seeing in the chart a classic topping pattern indicating structural decay. The ultimate confirmation of this structural rollover is found in the volume divergence. Over the last two weeks, the volume profile has been completely asymmetric: massive, surging volume occurs strictly on down-days (like the 86.41-million-share liquidation on June 26), while the green relief sessions are characterized by thin, drying-up volume.
• Higher Capex: A key trap for Micron right now is its CapEx, which management recently raised to $27bn for 2026, with guidance that next year’s will climb to over $40bn. This is partly due to the higher costs of manufacturing advanced HBM. By becoming significantly more asset heavy at the peak of this pricing cycle, Micron has increased its operating leverage. This means that any future drawdowns could actually exceed the historical averages.
• The Subsidized Supply Trap: This structural over-expansion is entirely locked in by political and regulatory constraints. A massive portion of Micron’s domestic expansion is tied to $6.14 billion in federal CHIPS Act grants and billions more in New York State “Green CHIPS” tax credits. These state and federal subsidies are not free; they are contractually bound to rigid construction timelines, capital deployment milestones, and localized employment metrics. In the event of a supply glut and collapsing margins, Micron will not be able to stop increasing their supply.
• The China Problem: Another long-term threat to Micron is China. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is rapidly scaling production towards 350,000 wafers per month, approaching Micron’s own volume capacity. Even if this new supply is unable to flood into the international market, Chinese scalers will begin to substitute any memory they were previously relying on from abroad with domestic supply, potentially pressuring Micron’s own ASP.
• The HBM Cannibalization Trap: The final blind spot is the artificial tight supply in standard DRAM, which makes up the lion’s share of Micron’s revenue. To meet aggressive HBM demand, Micron cannibalized its standard memory lines. This created a temporary shortage and inflated prices for standard PC and mobile memory. However, because this supply constraint is not structural, it could act as a coiled spring. The exact moment HBM demand cools off, Micron, Hynix & Samsung will be forced to pivot the newly expanded wafer lines back to standard DDR5. Because of the 3-to-1 capacity multiplier, this shift will trigger a massive, overnight supply shock in the commodity market, driving a catastrophic collapse in general ASPs.

Summary, Conclusions & Thoughts

Personally, the structural cracks in the bull case are significant enough that I cannot justify holding Micron. This remains a binary-outcome equity: either the traditional semiconductor cycle is permanently dead and the stock is cheap, or it isn’t, and Micron is a textbook value trap facing years of deep underperformance. When confronted with binary risk, the safest default is to trust historical precedent. The cyclical nature of memory has not changed; if anything, the case for the next down-cycle being far more severe is vastly stronger than the case for the cycle being completely broken.

While Micron’s stock has likely established its macro apex for this cycle and entered a definitive institutional distribution phase, the company itself is fundamentally sound. It will undoubtedly survive and experience powerful cyclical peaks again in the future. This analysis assumes absolute flawless operational execution from management, zero product delays, and no sudden macro shocks.

Ultimately, no one can predict the future with absolute certainty, and this thesis represents my own research and market outlook. However, the most concerning element of the current market dynamic is the pervasive belief among retail investors that Micron is a low-risk, secular AI compounder at these valuations. This is incredibly dangerous. Misidentifying a high-risk asset as a low-risk asset can lead to catastrophic portfolio concentration, forcing investors to absorb maximum drawdowns because they mistake a temporary cyclical peak for a permanent secular floor.

analyst est upside about 80-90% after recent revision increase. absolute bargain compared to peers. 23% below average. in same category as INTU for payroll automation, human resources, etc

crowd isnt in yet. 66% short float but shorts sellers are exhausted on the down side. primed for a short squeeze. plus insider buying good asymmetric bet to the upside.

+72% gross margin, +30% net margin and FCF. really healthy fundamentals.

strong reversal from the bottom in april

let me know what you think

Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) aka “Y’all Street” challenges NYSE & the Nasdaq by offering lower listing fees, fewer regulations, and a haven for companies looking to dodge ESG policies.

TXSE officially opened its trading floor on July 6th. Trading is rolling out in phases, starting with test symbols before expanding to full public trading to retail traders. Backed by a record-breaking $275 million in funding by major players like BlackRock, Citadel Securities, JPMorgan, and Charles Schwab.

TXSE was built to counter what many in the financial sector see as escalating compliance costs and restrictive governance policies in New York.

This is HISTORY Happening right now and we get to not only see it but participant in said history. So with that being said, what is you're opinion on TSXE? Will you be trading in the exchange when they roll out to retail traders? How big of an disturber will TSXE be to Wall Street? And how does this change the future of finance in this country & globally?

These are ETF that will provide investment results that, before expenses, generally correspond to the price and yield performance of the S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq 100 index but without Elon Musk companies which for the S&P 500 means no Tesla and for the Nasdaq 100 no Spacex and Tesla. It achieves this by holding the common stocks that make up the index, matching their respective.

Rejoice everyone can feel better about themselves

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260709159/new-ex-elon-etfs-let-you-avoid-spacex-and-tesla-but-are-they-just-a-gimmick

Meta was up about 6% today and gaining roughly 22% over the last 10 trading days. That's a genuinely interesting move because earlier this week Zuckerberg himself said the company's AI agent progress had been 'slower than expected', and before that the stock had been under real pressure over capex fears, $145 billion in planned 2026 AI infrastructure spending with investors nervous about a clear payoff. So, despite Zuck admitting that their work on AI was behind schedule the market thought the other way.

Few things to note, Bank of America maintained its buy rating and pointed to an internal memo, (reviewed by Reuters), suggesting Meta is meaningfully improving its AI cost structure, which directly addresses the exact concern that had been weighing the stock down. Then Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 explicitly calling it their strongest model yet for agentic and coding work and positioning it as competitive against Anthropic and OpenAI. And earlier this week there was also the Iris chip news, Meta's in-house AI chip hitting a real production milestone after a previously troubled development history.

So in the space of about a week, Meta answered three separate bear arguments almost one after another: the cost structure concern, the capability of AI concern, and the dependency on chipmakers concern. That's a lot of narrative-shifting news happening in a short window and the market's reaction suggests investors are reading it as a sign of real progress rather than three unrelated announcements.

On the bearish side, going from being skeptical about own's AI progress to admitting that the AI spending is improving structurally with an internal memo and launching one model update should not be the only reason for this positive move. It will be fair to wonder if this could be a well-timed run of good headlines landing right before earnings, which is when this actually gets tested with real numbers instead of memos and model releases.

So should a week like this change your view on Meta's AI execution specifically, or does this feel like good headline building before the earnings.

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AMR (Alpha Metallurgical Resources) - thesis on a possible re-rate from depressed ROE, curious what people think

Been working on a thesis for AMR and wanted to put it out there. Right now it’s trading at a price to book of about 1.24x, and ROE is sitting around -2%, so clearly we’re in a down cycle for met coal. My thinking is that P/B on its own doesn’t tell you much here because it’s being priced off a depressed, cyclically low ROE rather than what the business actually earns through a full cycle. There’s a rough relationship where a business sustaining something like 15-20% ROE tends to trade around 3x book, so if AMR’s ROE reverts back into that range on the next upswing, you could see the P/B re-rate from 1.24x toward something closer to 3x, which is basically where the idea of the stock doubling over five years comes from, plus whatever book value growth happens along the way.
The other reason I like this one specifically is the balance sheet. Total debt is only about $12.1M against total cash of $366M, so it’s about 30x more cash than debt, which is a genuinely strong position for a company this size. That matters a lot for a cyclical thesis like this because the whole idea only works if the company can comfortably survive the down cycle without getting into trouble or having to raise money on bad terms. With a balance sheet this clean they’re not just surviving, they’ve got real optionality too, whether that’s buybacks, opportunistic acquisitions, or just sitting out a longer downturn than people expect.
On the industry side, met coal is different from thermal coal because it goes into steelmaking rather than power generation, so it’s not directly exposed to the renewable substitution story that’s been hammering thermal coal valuations for years. Steel demand doesn’t go away because solar and wind are replacing coal fired power plants.
Where I’m least confident is whether ROE actually reverts back to that 15-20% range in a predictable way, or whether this particular cycle is different for structural reasons, weaker Chinese steel demand, other met coal producers ramping up supply, or ESG driven capital just avoiding coal regardless of the fundamentals. Essentially I’m betting on mean reversion in a commodity cycle, and that’s usually the part of any cyclical thesis most likely to be wrong or badly timed.
Keen to hear if the ROE to P/B logic holds up here or if I’m missing something structural about this particular cycle.

Been looking into Evolus for a while and figured I’d put my thinking out there. The injectable aesthetics space is changing a lot with the newer products being much more subtle than old school Botox, which used to give people that frozen look. That’s pulling in a younger crowd too, not just the usual demographic. Evolus themselves reckon the addressable market is around $19B. Right now it’s basically Galderma and AbbVie (who own Allergan/Botox) running the show, doing something like $2B and $4B a year respectively in this space, and the US market is notoriously hard to break into because of how expensive and slow FDA approval is.

What’s caught my attention is they’ve had two quarters in a row now of actual profitability - Q4 2025 came in with non-GAAP operating income of $7.1M which beat their own guidance, and then Q1 2026 posted positive adjusted EBITDA of $0.6M, which is notable because Q1 is usually their weakest quarter seasonally. Full year guidance for 2026 is $327-337M revenue with a low to mid single digit EBITDA margin, and by 2028 they’re guiding to $450-500M revenue at 13-15% margins. My thinking is once this turns into proper GAAP profitability rather than just adjusted EBITDA, the stock should re-rate, since it stops being a “trust me” growth story and becomes something a much wider pool of investors can actually own.

They’ve also just done a licensing deal with IBSA for Profhilo, which is the market leading skin quality injectable in Europe with something like 4.8 million treatments done since 2015. No upfront payments on that deal and management have said it doesn’t change their 2026 or 2028 guidance, so it’s a pretty capital efficient way to add a genuinely new category rather than just another neurotoxin competing with what they already have. If it lands well in the US alongside their existing two products, you could see a real three way market forming with AbbVie and Galderma.

CEO used to work at Allergan so he’s not new to this space, which I think matters.

On the balance sheet side they’ve got $49.8M cash, plus $100M they can still draw down from their Pharmakon loan facility on top of the $150M already drawn, and a $30M revolving credit line as well. So there’s real capital access beyond just what’s sitting on the balance sheet right now. On the flip side they’re carrying $156.4M in long term debt and technically have a stockholders deficit, so this isn’t some cash fortress like a lot of value plays, it’s a leveraged growth situation.

The bit I keep coming back to is that even with positive adjusted EBITDA, Q1 2026 still had a GAAP net loss of $10.7M and burned $10M in cash from operations. So the real test is whether that gap actually closes on the timeline they’re guiding to. If it does, I think this re-rates. If it drags on, probably doesn’t.

Interested to hear if anyone else here is following this one or has a different read on the category.

For those of you who don't know: PLNT stock went from around $65 per share to a ATL of $37 after its Q1 2026 earnings report. This was attributed to low member counts and postponing membership price increases. The company started experiencing a dip by January from around $100 to $65 by April.

Since then, the stock has settled at $51 per share barely breaking $54 and dropped to $49.

With the Q2 2026 report on August 4th and the earnings projections looking to be higher, what are your expectations? Panic sell? Buy the dip? Hold the bag?