Disclosure: I hold SKHY. Nothing here is investment advice.
Key points
- SK Hynix posted a 76% operating margin on July 29 and its Seoul shares still fell 9.61%.
- SanDisk (SNDK) reports Wednesday. It fell 5.1% Friday to $1,214.87 while Goldman's target sits at $2,200.
- Microsoft tied about $25B of its $190B capex guide to memory costs. Amazon raised its own to $220B.
- Trump cancelled a strike on Iran Saturday night and said Hormuz opens. Oil closed Friday up 1.3%.
The one that matters this week is SanDisk (SNDK) on Wednesday. But Monday opens on something that happened Saturday night, so let's clear that first.
Monday is about a Saturday night post
At 10:05 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was "locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran," and then that he'd been asked to hold off because "the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to." That deal, he wrote, "would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran's nuclear threat." He agreed to cancel the attack, "subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL."
Read those last five words again. Nothing is signed. He called off a strike on the promise of one.
Here's why it matters Monday morning. Oil went into the weekend priced for the opposite outcome. The United States Oil Fund closed Friday at $129.18, up 1.3% on the day, and the energy sector closed up 1.0%. That's a tape leaning toward escalation, and it got a de-escalation headline while it was shut.
So it probably gaps lower. A deal nobody has signed can come apart before Wednesday, and the same account that cancelled the strike can un-cancel it. That's headline risk in both directions, and I don't have an edge on which headline shows up first.
Wednesday is the one that matters
SanDisk reports fiscal Q4 on August 5 with the call at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time, and there's an investor day the following Thursday. We laid out the full calendar last week, because SanDisk is the biggest name in a group of nine reporting between Tuesday and Thursday.
I think the earnings will be really good. NAND has been tight all year, Goldman's James Schneider raised his target from $1,200 to $2,200 on July 5 for exactly that reason, and I haven't seen anything saying the demand isn't real.
And I don't think that settles what the stock does.
The shortage isn't in question anymore
Nobody is still arguing about whether memory demand is real. Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal in June that the crunch is "a hundred-year flood" and that he had "never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years." He said price increases on Apple devices are unavoidable. Elon Musk put it in writing on Tesla's second-quarter earnings call in July, thanking Micron twice for giving Tesla "a very significant allocation on reasonable terms given the pretty insane pricing of memory these days." He thanked Samsung and TSMC on the same call, and Micron rose 3.1% on the news. That is a customer publicly thanking a supplier for agreeing to sell to him. Nvidia's Jensen Huang called memory the biggest bottleneck in AI at CES in January and said the shortage runs for years, not quarters.
Then the buyers put money behind it. Microsoft guided 2026 capex to $190 billion, roughly 23% above what analysts had modeled, and tied about $25 billion of that to higher memory and chip costs. Amazon's Andy Jassy took his own guide up to $220 billion and named the inflated price of memory directly.
All of that is why I think the quarter is good. It's also why a good quarter might not be enough. When the CEO of Apple, the CEO of Nvidia and the two largest cloud buyers have all said out loud that memory is scarce and getting expensive, none of it is news by Wednesday. It's the bar SanDisk has to clear.
What SK Hynix already showed us
Before the July 29 earnings, we wrote that SK Hynix would most likely have the best quarter in its history. That was right. Revenue came in at 79.3 trillion won, about $54.6 billion. Operating profit was 60.5 trillion won, roughly $41.6 billion. That's a 76% operating margin, which is a number most companies can't hit on their best product line, let alone across the whole business.
In Seoul, SK Hynix closed down 9.61% that day.
Here's the reason. Consensus wanted 84.06 trillion won of revenue and 64.09 trillion of operating profit, and both lines came in about 5.5% light. The margin was fine, so the whole miss was revenue. President Song Hyun-jong said on the call that HBM4 shipment timing "was deferred to the second half," which "affected the overall blended average selling price."
Nothing broke. A shipment moved to the next quarter. You can argue the business is better than the tape says, since those long-term agreements run three to five years across more than ten customers and cover about half of revenue. But the bar had been raised all year, and the print landed under it, so the stock fell.
SanDisk walks into Wednesday with a bar that just got raised the same way. Goldman didn't nudge that target. They took it up 83%, against a stock at $1,214.87.
Friday already told you something
| Friday, July 31 | Close | Day |
|---|---|---|
| SanDisk (SNDK) | $1,214.87 | -5.1% |
| Micron (MU) | $822.59 | -6.0% |
| SK Hynix (SKHY) | $143.75 | -3.5% |
| Western Digital (WDC) | $544.52 | +2.2% |
The memory complex sold off before the print, not after it. Micron fell 6%, and SanDisk fell 5.1% while Western Digital rose 2.2%. That split matters. Western Digital is the hard drive side after the spin, and it held up just fine. What got sold was flash and DRAM specifically, which is the exact part of the group that reports Wednesday.
If SanDisk prints a good quarter and trades down anyway, that's twice in eight days the market has told us that good numbers and a good reaction are two different things. I'd rather know which one Wednesday is before I pay for it.
Sources
- SK hynix 2Q26 business results, reported July 29, 2026, and the same day's earnings call, where President Song Hyun-jong addressed HBM4 shipment timing and the long-term agreement structure
- Donald Trump, Truth Social post, August 1, 2026, 10:05 p.m. Eastern
- Tesla second quarter 2026 earnings call, where Elon Musk thanked Micron for its memory allocation, as reported by Bloomberg
- Tim Cook interview with The Wall Street Journal, June 2026, on memory costs and Apple device pricing
- Sandisk press release of July 8, 2026, setting the August 5 results date and the August 13 investor day, and Goldman Sachs' price target change on SanDisk of July 5, 2026
- Microsoft and Amazon fiscal 2026 capital expenditure guidance, and Jensen Huang's CES 2026 remarks on memory supply
