The AI trade rallied Monday. Memory fell as much as 8% at the open even as chip prices kept rising.
Micron (MU) has lost a third of its value since June 25 and SanDisk nearly half. CoreWeave and Vertiv fell about half as far, and Nvidia rose. Memory contract prices never fell. What changed is the rate of increase, which went from 93-98% a quarter to a forecast 13-18%.
SanDisk (SNDK) beat every line and guided way above consensus. The stock fell anyway.
SanDisk (SNDK) reports fiscal Q4 on August 5 with Goldman's target at $2,200 and the stock at $1,214.87 after a 5.1% Friday drop. SK Hynix printed a 76% operating margin on July 29 and Seoul still closed down 9.61%, because revenue missed consensus by 5.5%.
You cannot buy China's CXMT in the US. You can buy the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), which has $627 million riding on it.
The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) added a $627.5 million CXMT total return swap at a 2.52% weight, five days after CXMT's Shanghai listing. The position is bigger than GigaDevice, and there was no CXMT line in the fund's July 23 file.
Kioxia is the memory chip maker that passed Toyota as Japan's most valuable company, then fell 66%. Here's who owns it
Kioxia is the former Toshiba Memory, and it makes NAND flash and nothing else. Toshiba still holds 15.10% and keeps selling, an SK Hynix (SKHY) vehicle holds 14%, and Sandisk (SNDK) co-owns the factories. What the company makes, who owns it, and how a US investor can reach it.
The Nasdaq fell six days straight, then chips ripped. Microsoft, Samsung, and Citadel buying out Aschenbrenner all landed inside 18 hours.
The Nasdaq's six-day losing streak ended at exactly six, which our own history piece said was the single most likely outcome. Microsoft's $678 billion backlog, Samsung's call that the chip crunch runs to 2028, and Citadel buying the bulk of a leveraged $24 billion book all arrived between Wednesday's close and Thursday afternoon.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI fund sold its levered stock book, longs and shorts, to a single buyer. It was levered as much as four times.
CNBC's David Faber reported that Situational Awareness sold its entire public equities book, longs and shorts together, to a single buyer. The fund reached $24 billion near its highs and ran leverage of as much as four times. Its last public filing shows 62% of a $13.68 billion book was bets against chip stocks, and the stocks it owned outright fell twice as far.
Samsung posted its best quarter ever. Seoul was up 5.54% on it, then gave the whole thing back.
Samsung's stock fell 5.23 percent on July 29, a day before its own confirmed earnings even came out. When the record numbers landed Thursday, the Kospi rose as much as 5.54 percent, then gave all of it back and closed lower.
Microsoft (MSFT) grew Azure 43% with $678 billion already booked. That is what Nvidia (NVDA) and Micron (MU) needed to hear.
Microsoft held its capital spending outlook near $190 billion, grew Azure 43% and rose 7.6% after hours. Meta raised its capex range by $10 billion at the low end, missed on earnings at $6.18 against a $7.14 estimate, and fell 9.0%. The market stopped scoring hyperscalers on capex announcements and started scoring them on whether the revenue arrives. That is a better setup for Nvidia, Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor than another spending headline, though it does nothing about the memory supply problem that actually caused July.
The Nasdaq is down six days straight. We checked what happened next all 85 times, so you don't have to.
The Nasdaq Composite closed lower for a sixth straight session on July 29, finishing at 24,442.94, down 5.4% over the run and 9.8% below its June record. It has happened 85 times since 1971. One month after those streaks the index gained a median 1.5%, which is exactly what a random month returns, and at three months it actually underperformed. The averages hide everything: every streak from 2000 to 2002 was followed by heavy losses, and every streak after 2009 by gains.
The Fed held rates 9 to 3. Warsh says the AI capex boom is driving up chip prices.
The Fed held the federal funds target range at 3.5% to 3.75% on July 29 in a 9 to 3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting in favor of a quarter-point increase. Chairman Kevin Warsh listed the AI capex boom as one of four questions the committee debated and said it is driving up prices of memory and logic chips. The June minutes show many participants expect AI infrastructure demand to keep pressuring technology and electricity prices.
Micron (MU) CEO sold $37.3 million in stock, the same 40,000 shares he has sold every 28 days since May
The Form 4 landed July 28 showing $37.3 million sold. It is the same 40,000-share block Micron's chief executive has sold every 28 days since May, on a plan signed back in January.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reported a record quarter and still missed. One analyst broke from the pack and called it within a quarter of a percent
SK Hynix reported 60.5426 trillion won ($41.6 billion USD) of operating profit against a 64.09 trillion won consensus, 5.5% short, on revenue 5.6% short. Both figures are records. The operating margin came in at 76%, right where the street had it, so the entire miss was revenue rather than profitability. Korea Investment & Securities was the only firm below the pack and landed within a quarter of a percent.
Kioxia hit limit-down again and is down 60% from its June peak. Sandisk (SNDK) co-owns its factories (July 28, 2026)
Kioxia closed at its limit-down price of 44,550 yen ($272 USD), down 18.33%, after finishing at the bottom of its daily band on July 17 as well. It is 60.5% below the 112,700 yen peak it set on June 22. It shares the Yokkaichi and Kitakami NAND plants with Sandisk (SNDK), which is why the two keep falling together.
Citadel says the Fed hikes Wednesday. All 104 economists Reuters asked say it won't (MU, NVDA, July 28, 2026)
I was sure Citadel's rate call knocked the Nasdaq down 2% Tuesday morning. Nvidia (NVDA) was green while Micron (MU) fell 7.69% and the 2-year yield never moved, so it was not the Fed at all. It was Seoul. Here is the split that actually matters at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
Michael Burry posted three charts making the AI bear case. Two of them show the selling already happened.
Burry shared three Bloomberg charts on the AI trade. One maps the circular deals around Nvidia (NVDA). The other two show big tech forward multiples back at or below their 10-year averages, with Apple (AAPL) the lone expensive name and the only megacap missing from the circular map.
Korea's Kospi fell 10.84% and halted trading. Nvidia (NVDA) is flat and Micron (MU) is down 10% (July 28, 2026)
Korea's Kospi closed at 6,023.66 on Tuesday, down 10.84%, its fourth largest one-day fall on record, after Korea Exchange stopped all trading for 20 minutes. Samsung and SK Hynix each lost more than 13%. The US carryover went into memory and storage, with Sandisk (SNDK) down 14.52% and Micron (MU) down 9.54%, while Nvidia (NVDA) held flat and the Dow rose.
I let Claude AI trade $100 on Robinhood, week 6: It swapped CleanSpark (CLSK) for D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) and quit 23 minutes later
Claude AI's CleanSpark (CLSK) stop fired Monday for a $2.36 loss and was right, since CLSK fell another 10% after. Then it bought D-Wave (QBTS) at Tuesday's open into a chip crash, sold 23 minutes later for $1.80, and filed a report two minutes after that saying it had not traded.
Micron (MU) accounting chief sold 879 shares for $879,000, at exactly $1,000 each, two days before the 10% drop
Scott Allen sold 879 Micron shares for $879,000 at exactly $1,000 each on July 23, the only unscheduled large insider sale our tracker caught last week. His other 34,958 shares stayed put.
About $25 billion of Microsoft's (MSFT) AI budget is memory getting more expensive. Wednesday says whether that grew.
Microsoft told investors in April it would spend about $190 billion on capital projects this year. Around $25 billion of that increase bought nothing new, it was the same buildout at a higher price after memory costs rose. Microsoft reports Wednesday after the close, two hours after the Fed decision.
Michael Burry's picks: the Micron (MU) bet is up 17%. He has been averaging down on Lululemon (LULU) since 2025.
Burry deregistered Scion, so the 13F trail stopped and his trades now surface first on a newsletter with 300,000 subscribers. Here is everything he has disclosed since June, priced as of July 27. The point of laying them out together is that he is not always right.
Nasdaq futures were up over 1% and things looked good. Then chips tanked and took the whole gain with them, led by ASML, Micron (MU) and Nvidia (NVDA) (July 27, 2026)
Futures pointed to a strong open on the Iran ceasefire and a 6.79% drop in oil. QQQ opened up 1.09% and was negative within the hour. Three chip headlines did it, and two of them came out of China: a domestic DUV lithography report that hit ASML, and CXMT's Shanghai debut that hit Micron.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed up 466% on day one and is worth as much as Intel. Its factories are sold out through 2027.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%, passing ICBC as China's most valuable listed company and drawing level with Intel. Only 6.73% of its stock was tradable. The order book behind it is the part that matters for Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY).
Korea signed $950 billion in AI deals, then foreign investors sold 2.9 trillion won of SK Hynix and Samsung (July 27, 2026)
Monday was the first Seoul session after Korean companies signed about $950 billion of AI agreements in San Francisco. Kospi opened 1.7% higher, then fell almost 2% when China's CXMT closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%. Foreign investors sold a net 2.9039 trillion won of Kospi stocks, and the two they sold most were SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
US strikes on Iran paused. Oil fell more than 3%, and Micron (MU) and Nebius (NBIS) rose over the weekend
US Central Command has gone two straight nights without striking Iran, and a Defense Department source told CNN operations are on a hold. Polymarket puts an effective ceasefire at 75% by August 31. US markets were shut all weekend, but the tokenized stock market never closed, and it spent Sunday buying the AI trade and selling oil.