Preview of the week starting 28Sep2026 - Payrolls, PCE and a coin-flip in Sydney Economic Calendar (28Sep2026) Economic calendar for the week (source: Investing.com, via Benson) A genuinely live week: two US prints that can move the rates path, one central-bank decision that is too close to call, and China going quiet for Golden Week from Thursday. 1. The RBA decides — and the market has not made up its mind (Tuesday 29 September, 2:30 pm AEST). The cash rate sits at 4.35%. Pricing is roughly 55/45 between a 25 bp rise to 4.60% and a hold; NAB expects the rise this week, ANZ, CBA and Westpac lean to November. The awkward part: August CPI lands on Wednesday, after the vote, so the board decides with July's 3.5% headline (3.6% trimmed mean) as its freshest read. Whichever way it goes, the st

News and my thoughts from the past week (28Sep2026) Benson's selected items (drafted from his inputs, his fact-check notes applied): 1. Weather and natural disasters across Asia. Typhoon Dujuan swept Japan's Kanto region around 21–23 September, bringing record rainfall, landslides and flooding with a rising death toll, and another storm was intensifying near Okinawa by week's end. Vietnam is still recovering from heavy rain and flooding across its northern and north-central provinces from mid-September, with homes inundated and crops damaged. In Thailand, all 50 Bangkok districts were declared disaster areas after severe rainfall, school closures and disruption to government travel — continued rain raises the risk of worse. In the Pacific, Hurricane Polo is real but its near-term threat is

The global semiconductor memory market in 2026 is experiencing an unprecedented structural squeeze. While Big Tech hyperscalers, GPU titans, and cloud providers aggressively absorb massive volumes of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and enterprise-grade DDR5, persistent shortages continue to plague the electronics ecosystem. In this article, we would like to offer a comprehensive financial analysis of High-Bandwidth Memory deficits, supply chain bottlenecks, and equity options execution. 1. The Paradox of Abundance: Why Memory Remains Constrained The contemporary artificial intelligence infrastructure boom has fundamentally re-architected the semiconductor demand curve. Hyperscale cloud providers and AI accelerator developers are procuring record volumes of memory silicon. Yet, persistent suppl

Monday gave us one of the cleanest tests of the memory rally so far. SanDisk fell roughly 1.4% to around $1,766 after its S&P 100 inclusion became effective. Meanwhile: 🟢 Micron +2.77% 🟢 SK Hynix +0.73% 🔴 SanDisk -1.41% At first glance, that looks strange. If memory is still hot, why did one of 2026's biggest memory winners fall while its peers rose? I think the answer is important: The market may finally be separating the memory-cycle thesis from the SNDK trade. And that changes my Pick Levels. SNDK: The Easy Catalyst Has Expired SanDisk's S&P 100 inclusion created something traders love: a catalyst with a deadline. Index-tracking funds needed exposure. Traders could anticipate those flows. Momentum attracted more momentum. Then came September 21. The inclusion became effective. A

🔥 Two-Thirds of SNDK’s FY2028 Capacity Is Already Sold — This Memory Cycle Is Starting to Look Different The most important number in the memory market right now may not be NAND pricing. It may be two-thirds. SanDisk has already signed New Business Model agreements covering approximately 50% of its FY2027 bits and ~two-thirds of FY2028 bits. These aren’t simple purchase intentions — the agreements are built around committed volumes, minimum financial guarantees and structured pricing mechanisms. That matters because traditional NAND has always been brutally cyclical: Demand rises → manufacturers add capacity → supply catches up → prices collapse → margins compress. But what happens when a substantial portion of future production is already spoken for? 💡 The cycle becomes much more predicta

The indices: three of them, three directions On Tuesday the $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ Composite closed 0.45 per cent higher at 27,244.28, up 122.18 points on the day and a second straight close at a record; the $Dow Jones(.DJI)$ closed 0.36 per cent lower at 51,863.69, down 185.14 points, with $Cisco(CSCO)$, $JPMorgan Chase(JPM)$ and American Express leading the fallers at 4.50 per cent, 3.35 per cent and 2.62 per cent lower respectively; and the S&P 500 finished at 7,764.64, just 0.06 points below the 7,764.70 it closed at the previous session. That list of Dow f

Hi Tigers 🐯, Welcome to "What The Tigers Say." 👋 Memory led this week's rally as the $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ closed at a record — $SanDisk Corp.(SNDK)$, $Micron Technology(MU)$ and $SK hynix(SKHY)$ all pushing higher on the back of tightening capacity, with about two-thirds of next year's memory output already sold. But the moves have been messy to read: index flows, cyclical debate, and stock-specific catalysts are all tangled together. Let's rewind to the three sharpest takes from @Isleigh,

The $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ Composite closed 2.3 per cent higher on Monday at a record, its first since June; the $S&P 500(.SPX)$ closed 1.49 per cent higher at 7,764.70, which leaves it 0.4 per cent short of its own record; the $Dow Jones(.DJI)$ closed 0.7 per cent higher. What brought risk appetite back was falling oil prices and lower Treasury yields, and no company put out an announcement that day big enough to move the whole market. The $Philadelphia Semiconductor Index(SOX)$ rose 4.3 per cent, a fifth straight session of gains. The distance that opened up

The three US indices closed Friday almost where they started. The $Dow Jones(.DJI)$ fell 0.18 per cent to 51,682.64, down 95.40 points on the day; the $S&P 500(.SPX)$ closed 0.17 per cent higher at 7,650.50, up 12.74 points; and the $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ Composite closed 0.39 per cent higher at 26,522.54. It was a triple-witching day, with stock options, index futures and index options all expiring together and an index rebalancing on top, so volume was always going to be heavy. The calm at index level says very little; what was actually happening was money moving between sectors. The split between the indices is par

$MU$   Micron Technology (MU) Investment Thesis Micron Technology faces moderating memory price increases as supply and demand rebalance, but AI data center demand remains robust. MU's gross margins are supported by long-term supply contracts, with 40% of revenue soon tied to fixed or capped pricing. Capacity expansions—including Idaho-1, Singapore HBM, and Tonglou—will drive the next growth phase starting FY'27 amid industry-wide supply increases. Key risks include labor negotiations in Taiwan, potential customer inventory build-ups, and margin sensitivity in non-data center segments. Dell (DELL) COO captured this sentiment, noting that some public sector customers have fixed budgets a

Two-Thirds of Future Capacity Sold — Is Memory Becoming Less Cyclical? Memory stocks surged Tuesday, but the more interesting story may be happening underneath the share prices. $SanDisk Corp.(SNDK)$   SanDisk says roughly two-thirds of its FY2028 bits are already covered by new business-model agreements. That is significant because memory has historically been one of the most cyclical parts of semiconductors. What changed? SanDisk says its new agreements with eight customers cover approximately 50% of FY2027 bits and two-thirds of FY2028 bits. The contracts include committed volumes, minimum financial guarantees and pricing mechanisms.  That gives SanDisk something memory companies traditionally haven’t had: greater visibility into

Yes, AI security has the ingredients of a major investment theme, but I would separate the theme from the short-term stock price. The key question is whether AI creates enough new security spending to turn today’s headlines into sustained revenue and earnings growth. The recent rotation is logical: as companies deploy more AI agents, cloud workloads and automated software, they also create more identities, endpoints, data flows and attack surfaces that need protection. Recent warnings from AI companies have highlighted the security risks surrounding increasingly capable AI systems. At the same time, cybersecurity companies are reporting strong demand. For my three-stock watchlist, I would look at CrowdStrike (CRWD), Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and Fortinet (FTNT) because they give me three d

Recent sharp drawdowns across memory chipmakers and broader Artificial Intelligence (AI) market darlings have unnerved market participants, raising urgent questions regarding whether price-driven growth has reached its structural limits. In this article, we will be sharing how we analyse whether market price-driven growth is fundamentally broken and evaluates the tactical merit of rotating into defensive sectors while waiting for a technology recovery. Key Findings: First, market price-driven growth remains intact but is undergoing a critical transition from "speculative multiple expansion" to "fundamental ROI proof." The sell-off in memory and AI hardware reflects cyclical capacity digestion, elevated consensus expectations, and monetization scrutiny rather than an existential crisis. Mem

The indices closed lower for a second day on Tuesday, $S&P 500(.SPX)$ down 0.45 per cent at 7,585.73, the $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$ Composite down 0.78 per cent at 25,981.57 and the $Dow Jones(.DJI)$ down 0.63 per cent at 52,093.11. The reason for the fall, though, was not the same one as Monday's. On Monday the market was pricing what four executives had said, which is something that has not happened yet; on Tuesday two things had already produced a result — a Senate motion failed, and the 10-year Treasury yield reached a level it had not touched in nineteen years. The heaviest fall of the day was not in chips but in