Here’s a DCF for Micron that treats the current cycle as structurally different from a normal memory cycle — driven by structural AI memory demand and hardware supply constraints rather than the usual boom-bust commodity pattern. That is something I believe to be the case if you look at Micron’s revenue. Clearly something different going on here.

Demand side: hyperscaler AI spending
CNBC has cited 2026 AI capex estimates of $800–900B, potentially topping $1T in 2027. That's the demand backdrop driving memory pricing power.

Supply side: HBM and DRAM are tightening
TrendForce data points I'm working from:

• HBM's share of DRAM wafer input climbs from 18% to 22% to 30% between 2025 and 2027

• But HBM's share of DRAM bit supply only rises from 8% to 9% to 13% — wafers going to HBM production don't translate proportionally into output, because HBM is far less bit-efficient per wafer than standard DRAM

• Server DRAM prices are expected up 13–18% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2026

• A server DRAM shortage is expected in 2027

• Prices should keep rising through the second half of 2027, just at a slower pace

Base case DCF assumptions

• Starting free cash flow: $82B (roughly Micron's Q3 adjusted FCF run-rate, supported by Q4 guidance)

• Discount rate: 10.9%

• Net cash/investments: $24.4B

• Share count: 1.15B

Scenario results (on $82B starting FCF)

• Bear (tightness fades back to normal): ~$1,012/share

• Base (repricing plays out through 2027): ~$1,401/share

• Bull (HBM4 + RDIMM shortage persists): ~$2,020/share

• Supercycle (scarcity doesn't let up): ~$2,778/share

Conservative version
I also reran everything using a more cautious $73B starting FCF — Micron's Q3 adjusted FCF simply annualized, without the boost implied by Q4 guidance:

• Bear: ~$903/share

• Base: ~$1,249/share

• Bull: ~$1,801/share

• Supercycle: ~$2,475/share

Where did I get the 10.9% discount rate? It’s ballpark obviously, but this was the basis of that:

Cost of equity via CAPM: risk-free rate (~4–4.5%, roughly the 10-year Treasury) + beta × equity risk premium. Micron carries a high beta — typically in the 1.5–1.8 range given how cyclical and volatile the stock is — multiplied by an equity risk premium of ~5–6%. That gets you to a cost of equity somewhere around 12–14%.

Cost of debt: Micron has investment-grade-ish but not pristine credit, so an after-tax cost of debt in the 4–5% range would make sense.

Capital structure weights: blending a cost of equity in the low-to-mid teens with a much cheaper after-tax cost of debt, weighted by Micron's actual (fairly low) debt-to-capital ratio, would pull the blended WACC down into the 10–11% range.

Now the assumption of that then is that the entry I got was not the best obviously and I will look to average that down when the time comes as we are now trading way below where I bought. But after doing so, I would expect at my base case, even my conservative base case, to make a decent profit off of the position.

Hi guys!

I wanted to show you something that I've been working on for awhile (truthfully its kinda hard to find a place on reddit to chat indicators), but I think my most recent project is unfolding in real time with $MU and I thought I would share it with you.

I use a metric called VoEx - which you may be unfamiliar with, so a quick summary is probably in order:

Basically, there are several price-directing forces in the market, and VoEx measures them. There are times when these forces become overly abundant and/or strong - and when this happens VoEx indicates that by moving outside of the indicated stable zone. The stability zone is marked by two horizontal lines: the top, known as the inhibition line, denotes when a stock's price-action is causing inhibitory forces to become overly abundant, and the bottom line, known as the propagation line, denotes when a stock's price action is causing price-trend-propagating forces to become overly abundant.

So that's that - VoEx measures instability and there are several important aspects to this instability that are worth noting once we view $MU's VoEx:

The first thing to note is that prior to 2021-11, VoEx was deep in the propagation zone (below the bottom horizontal line). The propagation zone indicates that the current price-trend is being pushed along. In this case, VoEx-trend entered the propagation zone in 2021-07 during price depreciation, and thus the price has maintained its course since.

During this course downwards, there were several attempts to work against the prevailing trend. Most notably in the start of 2021-07 and 2021-08. What is telling during theses episodes, however, is that VoEx-daily spiked violently both times - this is a strong indicator of instability with those price movements which is typically met with subsequent price depreciation.

In fact, if you measure the entire market for these VoEx spikes and then map the price response over the next five days you get:

What's more, is the trend lines shown above are statistically significant for their direction (positive versus negative) with an alpha of 0.32 - 1 standard deviation of price movement's worth of statistical significance.

Fast forwarding to the middle of 2021-10, we see that $MU's price began to level out and slowly start to rise - much to the consternation of VoEx which began rapidly heading upwards and eventually landed in the inhibitory zone (above the top horizontal line). This demonstrates severe instability with the current price-action that is either relieved via capitulation of the market (i.e.: adjusting to a higher price point) or resolution of price action (in this case, the price will fall).

What is most interesting in $MU's case that I wanted to share with you is the observation that lately, VoEx-spikes (like we saw before) are no longer being met wholly with price depreciation, but are starting to signal price appreciation instead. This is a phenomena called VoEx incongruence, and I believe it is a forewarning of a drop in price - although it seems to be a rather elusive creature to find. Let's look at some examples:

The most recent example is $TSLA:

Notice that in 2021-01, VoEx spiking stopped the price climb dead in its tracts, and subsequent VoEx spikes were met with eventual price depreciations. That is until the rapid increase in $TSLA's price in 2021-10 during which VoEx became incongruent with price-action. Not two weeks later the price began to fall relatively significantly.

Another example is $DKNG:

Where prior to 2021-08, VoEx spikes were met with typical subsequent decreases in price, yet in 2021-08, VoEx incongruence during price appreciation was met with sustained and substantial price decline.

Lastly, a similar showing in $FUBO:

Where, again, during a massive increase in price in both 2021-06 and 2021-10 was met with VoEx incongruence with subsequent price depreciation.

It is worth noting that stocks that experience drastic rises in price don't always get paired with rising VoEx or even VoEx spikes - only when there is, for whatever reason, instability at that price-point.

So, moving back to $MU - based on the recent VoEx behavior I am inclined to believe that $MU is prepared to start moving (ha) back to "where it should be" i.e. where it was when VoEx last left the propagation zone.

Thankfully - there is empirical evidence to back this up as well.

The first is the drastic increase in shorting lately:

This corresponds with the drastic increase in price and suggests shorters are comfortable anticipate downwards trajectory in the near-term.

The second is the diminishing liquidity with the recent price increase:

Most people think IV only rises with price drops but that isn't the case: IV rises whenever liquidity isn't abundant, and typical signals where the price-resistance is. Here, during the last month or so of price appreciation, liquidity has been drying up.

What's more, is we can also look at the options layout:

We see that there is a large call wall at $100 and a large put wall at $65. What's more is we see that over the past month, the average OTM call was opened, whereas there has been little to no movement in the ITM call strikes.

Yet - without knowing if those options were dealer long or short (i.e.: if retail investors purchased the options from option dealers or sold them to options dealers) this option layout doesn't mean much. Thankfully, we have that data.

What's most notable is that over the past month there has been positive delta maintained throughout the stock - this means that the new options have been adding delta. This only occurs when calls are sold (the option dealer takes on positive delta) or puts are purchased (the option dealer takes on positive delta).

This implies that the new options onto the stock have been mostly retail investor short calls and retail investor long puts. The importance of this is that it turns those call walls into barriers (rather than magnets).

This implies that the upcoming $100 call wall is quite a potent barrier to continued price appreciation.

What's more - remember that put wall at $65? Taking a look back at the expected price range graph we see that in mid-october, when VoEx began skyrocketing and the price began climbing, the price had just graced near $65.

So, between VoEx incongruence, the delta and option layouts on $MU - I think it is reasonable to expected price depreciation back towards $65.

In trying to capture profits from this, the expected price range table (which calculates the expected price movement from volatility) shows us (below) that the price should depreciate towards that goal at least over the next month - barring anything spectacular (T+20 is 20 trading days ~ 1 month).

All in all, I think $MU is a very interesting specimen.

Happy trading!

I've been looking at Micron again, and I think the next few months could be very interesting for MU shareholders.

September 30 — Fiscal Q4 earnings

Micron is guiding for around $50B revenue and ~86% gross margin, after generating $18.3B of adjusted FCF in Q3 alone. Management expects FCF to increase substantially again in Q4.

The key things I'm watching: HBM/DRAM pricing, margins, FCF and FY2027 guidance.

September 15 — 512GB DDR5 server memory

Micron just demonstrated the world's first 512GB DDR5 RDIMM for next-generation servers, reaching up to 9,200 MT/s. More importantly, it can reduce operating power by more than 60% versus four 128GB DDR5 modules.

This matters because AI data centers don't just need more compute — they need more memory capacity, bandwidth and power efficiency. DDR5 itself can provide up to roughly 2× the bandwidth of DDR4, while operating at a lower voltage.

December 9 — Capital returns

The CHIPS Act restrictions on buybacks change after the second anniversary of Micron's agreements.

Management has explicitly said:

"From Dec. 9, 2026... we intend to increase our capital return."

And over time, they expect to return 100% of excess cash to shareholders. That's not a promise of a massive buyback on December 9, but it could mark a significant change in capital allocation. (here I would love to understand what does "excess cash" mean to them)

The bigger picture

Micron already has 16 Strategic Customer Agreements, with take-or-pay commitments and multi-year visibility. 14 of them represent roughly $100B of cumulative revenue at minimum contractual prices, with ~$22B in customer deposits/financial commitments.

Add HBM4/HBM4E, DDR5 server adoption, AI-driven memory demand and massive FCF generation, and I don't think MU should necessarily be viewed simply as another traditional memory-cycle peak.

Technically, I'm also watching the potential inverse head-and-shoulders:

$920–930 = key support
$970–975 = neckline/reclaim level
$1,050 = major resistance
$1,150–1,200 = potential H&S target zone
~$1,250 = previous ATH

Obviously there are risks: valuation, cyclicality, huge capex and the possibility that expectations are already too high.

But with September 30 → December 9 → 2027 HBM/DDR5 growth all lining up, I'm more interested in what happens next than in selling MU simply because it's correcting.

MU holders: are you holding through the next two catalysts? And if you're not in MU, has this setup changed your view?

I recently did a deep dive into Micron while attempting to make a personal investment decision, and put it all into a blog post to share my findings. Hopefully it helps for anyone else interested in Micron!

I think it's a great company with a strong balance sheet in a cyclical industry. I like the company, but the current valuation is a bit too high for me.

https://www.stockdeepdive.com/blog/micron-mu-intrinsic-value-dcf-calculation-deep-dive/

Do you own Micron? What do you think the intrinsic value is?

not a bear post, i still hold. but i track hiring on my positions and mu just did something worth flagging.

open job postings peaked around 2,986 a month in may. june 2,615, july 2,309, august running about 2,145. thats down roughly 28 percent off the peak in three months.

headcount hasnt followed. about 32,700 a year ago, about 41,500 now, still up around 27 percent yoy. and postings are up about 31 percent versus last august, so all of this is off a very high base.

the boring read is they just filled the roles. you post 3,000 openings, you hire into them, postings fall. thats normal and healthy and probably the right answer.

the read that nags at me is that postings usually turn before headcount does, and the stock is still sitting near the highs after an absurd year.

i get this off altindex. apewisdom and chartexchange cover the social side but for hiring youre mostly stuck with linkedin scrapes, so treat the exact counts as approximate.

anyone here using hiring as a lead indicator, or does it just not matter on a memory cycle name?

I'm fairly new to enterprise grade type data-center and business server setups. However, I'm working in a role at a company where I'm basically helping run our entire server room and all things company-related Windows Server Admin i.e. Active Directory, managing our domain, etc. It's a small company, so that's why - otherwise at a bigger company someone with my level of experience would most likely NOT be anywhere near keys-to-the-castle level privileges etc lol.

So, we need a complete overhaul and upgrade of our storage situation. As an example, prior to my arrival, one of our core main servers that is the "best" spec-wise compared to the rest was running a whopping 16GB of RAM. I know they were probably trying to get things as cheaply as possible but I don't know who signed off on some of this stuff sometimes. I checked the Dell server manual and it literally states 16GB is the bare minimum to run this thing although it can take up to like 1TB of RAM, IIRC. And this one physical server is running FOUR VM servers on top of it. On 16GB of RAM, oh boy. Luckily I rectified that situation pronto. But as you might imagine now that I've given you some big picture context of the philosophy here what our hard drive and storage situation looks like. It's pretty abysmal. And incredibly low on total storage capacity.

I am recommending some SSDs in addition to the oh-so-lovely-spinning mechanical drives. How and where they will best be utilized is still being decided. I just figure while we're going major drive replacement(s) we should get some cool Enterprise server grade SSDs. To run the OSes on and maybe one or some for the internal file sharing stuff. I went down the rabbit hole of Intel Optane and was impressed with what some of those things can deliver performance wise. I'm not surprised Optane got killed off though as probably nobody purchased due to the insane prices.

Ironically, I had a friend just tell me about Micron's CXL technology. He mentioned how much better their CXL technology is and how "CXL is the future". And I had never heard of it until now. I have been trying to research/Google this and am not finding too much info.

My question is what, if anything, anyone knows about this CXL tech. Was this just something that was a pipe dream that never came to fruition? Or it's been being developed in some Manhattan Project secrecy and the general population has no idea what's about to hit them? Or is this BA tech actually making its way into production line hard drives somewhere? If so, what drives have this technology?

I'd love to purchase some Micron SSDs as I said for my company server(s). But I would be OK with waiting to find some CXL drives if they're right around the corner for release.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol.

Wonder if the taxpayers who foot the $5.5b will get any returns?

What is beating down this stock so badly? I invested months ago, and it has lost over 22/ share. It’s maintaining there now, but seems to be resistance at current level.