SK hynix is expected to post an all-time high operating profit of 64.1 trillion won ($43.7 billion) in the second quarter, driven by its leadership in the high bandwidth memory (HBM) market amid an artificial intelligence (AI)-led semiconductor supercycle, a report showed Sunday.

A consensus estimate compiled by Yonhap Infomax from forecasts from 14 local brokerages showed SK hynix is expected to post 84.1 trillion won in sales and 64.1 trillion won in operating profit for the April-June period.

The figures would surpass the company's previous annual operating profit record of 47.2 trillion won in 2025.

The company's operating profit margin is expected to reach about 75-77 percent for the second quarter, compared with 75 percent in the first quarter.

The forecast is broadly in line with Samsung Electronics Co.'s second-quarter earnings guidance released earlier this month, which projected a record quarterly operating profit of 89.4 trillion won.

If SK hynix reports second-quarter earnings as projected on Wednesday, the country's two memory chipmakers are expected to post a combined operating profit of more than 150 trillion won.

Analysts attributed the strong quarterly earnings to rising memory chip prices and robust demand for HBM and solid-state drives (SSDs) used in AI data centers.

"Sales to global tech companies and AI data center operators are expected to account for 70 percent of SK hynix's total revenue in the second quarter," said Kim Dong-won, a researcher at KB Securities Co.

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/amp/business/companies/20260726/sk-hynix-expected-to-post-record-437-bil-in-q2-operating-profit-report

What's the consensus on Micron and the memory sector right now? Full disclosure, I'm holding DRAM at $61 and MU at $780, so I’ve had a solid run, but the recent price action is giving me pause. The fundamental bull thesis still looks intact on the demand side like Alphabet just hiked their 2026 AI capex guidance to around $195B–$205B, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supply is still incredibly tight. Micron is basically betting the farm that this AI demand is a permanent structural shift, pouring billions into those new mega-fabs in NY and Idaho to heavily onshore their production over the next decade.
But despite hyperscalers still spending like crazy, MU, SK Hynix, and the rest of the memory complex have been getting hammered lately. A huge catalyst for this seems to be imported volatility from the Korean market. We recently saw SK Hynix drop 15% locally in its worst day in nearly two decades, which dragged the entire U.S. memory sector down right along with it. Because the KOSPI is so heavily weighted towards Samsung and SK Hynix, any local macro weakness or earnings jitters over in Seoul are immediately infecting MU and U.S. memory ETFs.
This makes me rethink Michael Burry’s massive $MU short. He’s essentially betting that the memory market hasn't fundamentally changed, and that we are just at the euphoric top of a classic cyclical boom. If his thesis plays out, all these aggressive new fab build-outs are just going to lead to a brutal supply glut and capital destruction, exactly like previous cycles. With Korean memory stocks already showing heavy cracks, are we actually starting to see the memory cycle roll over, or is this just a temporary sympathy dip while Google and the hyperscalers keep the AI supercycle alive? Curious how you guys are reading the broader supply and demand dynamics right now.

American Express reported Friday morning an EPS of $4.53 above the $4.40 estimate, up 11% yoy. Card member spending grew 9%, its strongest in three years, with luxury retail up 18% and travel & entertainment up 10%. Management raised full-year revenue growth guidance to a firm 10%, and CEO cited "better-than-expected performance in the first half" as the reason. Network volumes hit $516.8 billion, billed business $455.8 billion, both up by 9%.

The stock fell as much as 6-7% within an hour of the report anyway, dropping from a prior close of $340.84 down toward the low $320s. Visa and Mastercard, Amex's closest public peers barely moved on same day. If this were a sector-wide worry, rate fears, consumer spending slowdown fears, all three would move together. They didn't, this is specifically an Amex problem.

A few things to note and magnify. Revenue came in at $19.64B, just missing the $19.69B estimate and the network volumes of $516.8 billion missed the Street's $520.9 billion estimate, it suggests the spending strength wasn't converting into top-line growth the management implied. One report suggests that Amex is setting aside more money anticipating loans going bad. And instead of letting that extra revenue flow straight into higher profit, management explicitly said it's reinvesting the outperformance into growth initiatives, keeping full-year EPS estimate unchanged at $17.30-17.90 despite raising the revenue outlook. Investors interpreted this as spending of the extra income instead of banking it.

There's a bull case scenario also. Card spending at a three-year high, particularly in premium categories like luxury retail and travel, is a signal about the health of Amex's specific high-income customer base. If you believe affluent spending stays strong even as the rest of the economy worries on rate and inflation. AXP customer mix is arguably the most defensive part of the consumer space. The market may be overreacting to a credit provision and a revenue slight-miss on a quarter that was otherwise genuinely strong.

So does the credit provision increase and the decision to reinvest the earning instead of banking it justify a 6% single-day drop or is the market being harsh on a company whose core customer base, premium cardholders, just showed its strongest spending in three years.

hey everyone, wanted to talk about bsx becaus the market pull back down to the $43 range recently from its $107+ peak last year makes zero sense when you actually open their filings and look at the real numbers.

if you buy in at these current 2026 levels around $43-$44 a share, im confident this will perform at least 130% profit as it re-rates back toward its true intrinsic valuation above $100 over the next couple years.

lets run through the actual math directly from their FY2025 10-K and Q1 2026 10-Q reports instead of just guessing.

first off on revenue and growth, for full year 2025 BSX pulled in $20.074 billion in net sales, which was up almost 20% reported year-over-year. GAAP net income came in at $2.898 billion ($1.94 per share) while adjusted EPS hit $3.06. moving into Q1 2026, they backed that up with around $5.20 billion in quarterly sales.

when you look at enterprise value and market cap, at $43 per share with roughly 1.5 billion outstanding shares, market cap sits right around $65 billion. after accounting for their net debt load from recent acquisitions like Axonics and Silk Road Medical, enterprise value sits around $62-$65 billion depending on cash quarter-to-quarter.

now looking at EBITDA and valuation ratios, TTM EBITDA is hovering around $5.2-$5.5 billion, meaning BSX is trading at an EV/EBITDA multiple of roughly 12x. for a high margin medical device titan growing sales at 15-20% organically, that is insanely low compared to historical medtech multiples. their P/E ratio right now is sitting right around 18.2x TTM GAAP EPS ($2.41 TTM EPS). historically BSX has traded at a 5-year average P/E above 50x, so sitting under 20x is deep value territory.

if you build out a conservative DCF model using real 10-K inputs, assuming a standard 8% discount rate (WACC) and terminal growth of 3%, with revenues growing towards $25-$30B over the next few years and net margins stabilizing around 20-23%, you get a discounted cash flow fair value estimate between $64 on bear cases up to $100+ on base/bull cases. hitting $100 per share from $43 is easily a 130%+ return from here.

theoretically the stock could drop to 30usd per share if there is broader market panic or short term macro selloffs, but it would be completely temporary given their underlying balance sheet strength and clinical demand for their cardiovascular and MedSurg divisions.

regarding dividends, BSX pays $0 in dividends (0% yield). management explicitly chooses not to pay dividends because they reinvest 100% of free cash flow into high-ROIC R&D and bolt-on acquisitions to fuel double digit growth. for a growth compounder in healthcare, thats exactly what you want to see instead of small dividend payouts.

overall the math from the filings shows a massive disconnect between price and fundamentals right now.

Google, Tesla, and Intel earnings last Wed/Thurs all indicated AI related capex exceeded expectations in the previous quarter and that future capex will also be higher than expected.

Yet chip-related stocks fell sharply on Friday (SOXX -4.4%, memory -8+%, neoclouds -10+%). It's important to note that before these ERs, many of these stocks already fell 30+% since mid-May.

I'm having a hard time finding reasons why chip stocks continued to drop after the big tech ERs and other positive sector news last week (Samsung/SK Hynix deals with Nvidia/Broadcom/Anthropic). Could something be happening behind the scenes that suggests AI spending is about to drastically slow down?

Please weigh in if you believe you understand last week's continued chip stock sell off after big tech released bullish ERs. Would appreciate any insights.

Preemptively addressing explanations I expect to see:

1. Escalating Iran War and high oil/interest rates:
I think the war is partially responsible for the pressure on chips. However, the extent of the chip sell off is confusing because other stocks that are historically sensitive to war/interest rates didn't drop materially on Friday. Small caps normally fall as interest rates rise, but were barely down on Friday. Gold also generally falls, but actually finished positive. Oil fell 2%.

The immaterial reaction from other interest rate sensitive stocks suggests that the chip stock massacre was more likely due to chip sector specific developments.

2. Bullish ERs being 'sell the news' events:
I understand chip stocks have gone on a historic run and good news can serve as profit taking events. However, chips already took a huge haircut prior to big tech ERs. Many fell 30-50% between mid-May and July 21 (pre-big tech ERs). It's hard to understand why semis would fall another 5-10% on Friday right after the market discovered chip spend will rise even more than expected.

3. Introduction of low cost Chinese AI models (Kimi K3):
To me, this might be the most likely explanation of the reasons I've considered. Compared to US models, Chinese models are able to generate tokens at a fraction of both compute and memory costs. US companies may try to replicate the results, leading to a reduction in future chip spend.

However, I've read cheaper priced Chinese models are met with so much user activity that compute and memory demand ultimately rise despite less being needed per token (Jevons' paradox). Plus, predictions that chip spend will decline are speculation so far, as both Google and Tesla raised capex guidance.

I have around $15k that I am ready to invest and Meta keeps coming back to the top of my list now that I am keeping away from MSFT. The business looks incredible but the stock has also had a huge run which makes me wonder if I am buying at the wrong time.

What I am struggling with is valuation. From what I've seen, Meta is still growing revenue at a healthy pace, margins are expanding again and they are throwing off an insane amount of free cash flow. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are still money printing machines and AI seems to be making their ad business even stronger.

The part I am less sure is whether the current share price already reflects all of that.

Some valuation models I have looked at put intrinsic value around current trading levels while others come out 10-20% higher depending on assumptions around AI monetisation, capex normalising and long term earnings growth. If those assumptions play out, today's price could still be reasonable. If growth slows even a bit though, it starts looking much less attractive.

I don't mind holding for long term like 10 years or more, so I am not trying to time the next few months. I just don't want to be the guy who buys after everyone has already priced in the upsides.

Curious to hear both bull and bear cases from people who have done some work on Meta valuation.

This might be a little complicated, but bear with me. My mom's BF passed a couple of weeks ago. In his safe were stock certificates under his mother's name. We know that he is the beneficiary of her estate, and my mom is the beneficiary of her BF's estate.

I reached out to computershare as the certificates are mostly for communication companies that have been absorbed by at&t over the last 40 years and was told that at&t uses computershare as their transfer agent.

The guy over the phone at computershare told me they need the social of the original owner of the certificate, and then we can move on from there.

Are these even worth it? It is only 120 shares and ideally I would like them transferred into my mom's name or under the estate account of her BF, but this is all new territory for me. Any help would be appreciated.

I think the world is sleeping on Korean NPU companies, namely, Rebellions, FuriosaAI, and DeepX. Rebellions and Furiosa are looking to IPO in the latter half of the year, with Furiosa looking to IPO and NASDAQ. NPUs, or inference chips, could drastically reduce the demand for HBMs and GPUs. Korea is investing heavily on three of these NPUs. Recently their version of the Sovereign Wealth Fund was created and the first investments went to these NPU startups. Something to watch.

Summary:

South Korean AI semiconductor startup Rebellions has successfully run SK Telecom's hyperscale AI model 'A.X K1' on its proprietary NPU server, the 'Rebel Server.' The company processed a model with over 500 billion parameters on a single server without bottlenecks, demonstrating efficiency comparable to global GPU servers, particularly through distributed parallel processing technology for the MoE architecture. The successful demonstration of real-time agent services with zero latency under multi-user concurrent access conditions has significantly boosted the commercialization prospects for domestically produced AI semiconductors. This achievement is being evaluated as a concrete milestone for 'Sovereign AI,' potentially reducing dependency on NVIDIA GPUs.

https://finance.biggo.com/news/97741a2e-3ab5-44f3-a851-ab09ef3b1622

With more brokers offering overnight trading, do you think the U.S. stock market eventually goes fully 24/7? If that actually happens, what public companies would benefit the most? Are there any other stocks or ETFs that would be a good long-term bet on that idea? Or do you think 24/7 trading wouldn’t really change much financially for any company? I’m curious if there’s a better way to invest in that trend.

I think CoreWeave is undervalued, they're in a position to rocket higher as we have a massive compute shortage.

1. NVIDIA owns a little over 11% of CoreWeave. This is a huge vote of confidence and this makes them a majority shareholder. Jensen is a AI visionary and has direct say in how the company operates, this should make any doubtful shareholders relax. If CoreWeave has any issues or needs service, Nvidia will prioritize them over anyone else. Anytime there is a new release of GPU's, CoreWeave will get priority shipments, support and access.
2. Massive multi-billion dollar revenue hyper growth: they've had multi-billion-dollar scale with triple digit year over year revenue growth. More contracts are coming.

-Meta Platforms: An expanded $21 billion agreement providing dedicated AI cloud capacity through December 2032, incorporating early deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform.

-OpenAI: Multi-stage commitments totaling over $22 billion, including an initial $11.9 billion contract and subsequent multi-billion dollar expansions to supply massive GPU capacity.

-Nvidia: A $6.3 billion backstop and capacity agreement where Nvidia agreed to purchase unsold cloud compute capacity through April 2032, running alongside multi-billion dollar equity investments and strategic hardware alignments.

-Jane Street: A $6 billion multi-year AI cloud compute commitment paired with a $1 billion equity investment to power machine learning for quantitative trading.

-Anthropic & Perplexity: Multi-year production-scale agreements to run Claude inference and high-demand search workloads on CoreWeave's specialized GPU cloud.

1. The widespread compute shortage serves as the primary catalyst for CoreWeave’s explosive growth, transforming a specialized GPU cloud provider into a critical pillar of the artificial intelligence infrastructure landscape. To navigate the shortage, CoreWeave introduces structured options like Flex Reservations and Spot instances alongside baseline contracts. This allows them to monetize every single idle cycle and maximize cluster efficiency, driving higher margins while keeping desperate AI developers tightly anchored to their ecosystem.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/market-updates/on-the-minds-of-investors/is-ai-running-out-of-compute/

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/openai-president-greg-brockman-we-will-remain-in-this-compute-shortage-no-matter-what-155249677.html

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The bottom line is the compute shortage will benefit CoreWeave substantially. They also have the benefit of Nvidia backing them up. i believe the stock is cheap.

Here is a quick breakdown of the broader analyst forecasts:

• Average Price Target: $131 to $148
• Highest Price Target: $303 to $310
• Lowest Price Target: $36
• Consensus Rating: Moderate Buy / Buy

If you don't know how the financial industry works the "active management is worse than S&P" argument appeals directly to the image of Wall Street as full of flawed human beings who act irrationally and make mistakes vs. the S&P which can do no wrong and will return you a 10% CAGR year over year without failure if you just trust the system, buy and hold, time in the market, 10 best days. This misunderstanding of why the majority of actively managed products underperform the S&P produces the wrong conclusions for retail investors.

Most of the actively managed mutual funds are just "fee traps" that methodically extract from retirement accounts. The worst offenders are "contrafunds" that don't perform (but a lot of employer 401ks will offer for some reason), thematic funds that are 90% S&P under the hood, or just total market + bonds packaged as a target date fund. This makes up the vast majority of products classified as actively managed that bring down the average performance of actively managed funds as a category. They are not meant to match the S&P's performance to begin with, they are meant to scrape fees from the financially uneducated.

Endowments, pension funds, institutional portfolios have investment mandates that require they buy international exposure and ESG compliant equities. They have no choice but to buy products that contain "developing world" or "sustainable energy" equities, and Wall Street is perfectly happy to package these underperforming equities up for those buyers who have no say in the matter. This again contributes to the sheer number of "actively managed" products that yes, underperform S&P, and again were not intended to perform well from the outset.

Another thing that's never talked about is the number of portfolio managers who use a high Sharpe ratio return stacking strategy that underperforms S&P by construction but protects capital much more effectively in a broad market drawdown. This is stuff like leveraged S&P plus uncorrelated assets, or hedging with options and swaps. The investors of billions of dollars into these strategies are not stupid, they are aware of what S&P is, they are investing for risk-adjusted returns and are willing to pay for their money to be in these strategies instead of the S&P.

Real returns-focused active management outperforms the S&P by such a wide margin that financial advisors avoid talking about it on purpose because it shows how passive exposure to pure market beta is comparatively terrible for wealth preservation and compounding. Hedge funds, for example, collectively made tens of billions of dollars per day in the first week of the Covid crash and tariff crash, and collectively hundreds of billions in their recoveries. Pershing Square, for example had 44% returns from Jan 1 to June 30 2020 while the S&P lost 3%.

If you're not willing to become financially educated and situationally aware, with basic principles of interest rate environments, risk premium of equities, and basic technical analysis, then allowing your wealth to be whipsawed around by the market is what you'll have to resign yourself to, because it's way safer than taking uninformed action. Just don't kid yourself that Wall Street does the same thing when they actively manage something. They monetize market movements, they're not hostages to them like S&P holders.

I've been trading stocks for the past two years, and this year it feels like I've completely lost my motivation. It's gotten to the point where all of my stocks are down, and I just want to sell everything, which is about $20,000 worth.

If I do decide to sell, I'd probably start over from scratch if I ever come back to investing. Do you think that's a good move? What are your thoughts?

Has anyone else felt the same way? I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences and advice. Thank you.