Sandisk spent $4.5 billion on its own stock in the roughly nine weeks between the board’s April 30 authorization and the July 3 fiscal year-end. On August 5 the board added another $14 billion. That leaves $15.5 billion of firepower pointed at a stock trading around $1,600, about a third below the June 25 record close of $2,354.39. The correction took the price down. It didn’t touch the cash.

The $14 billion headline matters less than the $5.035 billion of adjusted free cash flow Sandisk generated in fiscal Q4, of which the $4.5 billion repurchase absorbed 89%. Annualize that quarter and the company throws off more than $20 billion a year. With about 149 million shares outstanding, the market cap sits near $240 billion, so the stock trades at roughly an 8% free cash flow yield on the current run rate. The entire remaining authorization is less than one year of cash at the Q4 pace. At $1,600 it retires about 9.7 million shares, or around 6.5% of the company, and management’s Investor Day framework commits to returning 100% of excess cash from here. This authorization will need topping up again.

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.

Sandisk closed Wednesday at $1,350.50, down 5.4% on the session, then traded toward $1,257 after the fiscal fourth quarter release put first quarter revenue guidance at $10.3 to $10.8 billion against a consensus near $11.16 billion. The stock is up roughly 490% year to date and has been the best performer in the S&P 500 in 2026. Its fifty-two week range runs from $40.53 to $2,354.39, the high set on June 22, and market capitalization sits near $200 billion on 148.1 million shares outstanding. Beta is 4.13. The target here is $4,000 within twelve months, and the case for it is not an earnings case.

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.

IBM closed down 25.2% at $217.07 on July 14, the steepest single-day decline in the company’s history and the worst drop in records that run back to 1968 — worse than the 23.7% collapse of October 1987. Roughly $67 billion in market value evaporated on a preliminary second-quarter print that missed revenue by 3.7%. That gap between the size of the miss and the size of the reaction is the entire story. The market did not sell a quarter. It repriced the forward earnings stream.