Where to even start. $MU dropped what Bloomberg is calling a generational earnings print — $41.5B in Q3 revenue vs. $35.7B expected, 84.9% gross margins (unheard of for a memory maker), and Q4 guidance of $49–51B against street estimates of $43B. Shares surged ~17% to an all-time high. The YouTube and Reddit sentiment leading into earnings was overwhelmingly bullish, with Mark Pincus on Bloomberg citing PEG ratios of 0.3 as evidence memory stocks were criminally undervalued. Then South Korean chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung both plunged 10%+ on reports of slowing AI memory expansion, and suddenly $MU was down ~13%, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index shed ~8%, and everyone who called the trade a slam dunk was very quiet.
Meanwhile $AAPL announced price hikes on Macs and iPads — publicly blaming Micron for soaring memory costs — and got a 6% haircut for its honesty. $QCOM held its Investor Day and projected $15B+ in annual data center sales by fiscal 2029, shares popped ~7%, which is what happens when you actually show up with a credible AI story. And in the most chaotic subplot of the week, $WEN surged 28% — its biggest single-day move since 2020 — because Reddit decided Wendy's needed saving and approximately 32% of the float was short, so you do the math.
On the macro side, Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, oil whipsawed between war premium and ceasefire optimism, and Chicago Fed's Goolsbee went on CNBC to confirm that inflation is still going the wrong way. The US-Iran ceasefire MOU exists, but as Bloomberg's Big Take noted, the two sides remain so far apart it's essentially a 60-day countdown clock with no plan. Welcome to summer 2026 — buy memory chips on the dip and maybe skip the Wendy's drive-through this week.
