The memory complex lost several billion dollars of market value on Monday on the strength of a Weibo account. Reports circulating over the weekend, traced back to a pseudonymous poster called Mobile Chip Expert and relayed through Wccftech and AppleInsider, said the Trump administration may permit Apple to source DRAM from ChangXin Memory Technologies and NAND flash from Yangtze Memory Technologies, with a decision communicated after a Trump-Xi meeting expected around September 24. SanDisk traded down as much as 9% to $1,458.29. Micron and Western Digital fell around 7%. Eight days earlier, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had told the Wall Street Journal that it is not great for American companies to be using Chinese memory, and the same names rallied hard on the session. A cabinet secretary on the record moved the group less than an anonymous leaker did. That is worth sitting with before anything else, because it says the complex is currently being priced on the policy narrative rather than on bits.

Monday’s memory tape looked like one trade and was actually two. Kioxia closed up 15.07% at ¥61,840 in Tokyo, inside a Nikkei that gained 0.74% to 69,220.25. CXMT closed up 12% at ¥61.80 in Shanghai, a record, lifting its market capitalisation to ¥4.13 trillion and holding the title of China’s most valuable listed company, which it took from Tencent on Thursday. Nanya extended a month that has now delivered more than 30%. Micron traded up 3% pre-market, SanDisk up 5%, and the SK Hynix ADR up 4%. South Korean markets were shut for a holiday.

Both companies beat on the top and bottom lines on Thursday evening. Amazon closed the regular session at $235.50 and traded up to roughly $252 after hours, a gain of about 7% at the print and 9% at the peak. Apple closed at $333.43 and traded down to roughly $312, a decline of more than 6%. The divergence had almost nothing to do with the quality of the two beats and almost everything to do with a single input cost that both companies discussed at length: DRAM.

A well-reviewed laptop got marked down this week for a reason that had nothing to do with the laptop. The Framework Laptop 13 Pro earned praise for its processor performance, its build quality, and its keyboard, and then lost points for price — with the review attributing the cost directly to high RAM prices. If you have been pricing a machine recently and wondering why the numbers look worse than they did a year ago, that is the explanation, and it is not going to reverse quickly.