Cramer reversed his career rule against buying parabolic stocks, endorsing SanDisk (SNDK), up 591% year to date, on a structural memory shift. Micron (MU) locked in $22 billion in customer deposits and roughly $100 billion in obligations through take-or-pay contracts, structurally breaking memory's boom-bust pattern. At 4.63%, the 10-year Treasury pressures SanDisk's 22x P/E, and one hyperscaler renegotiating below floor price would collapse the structural thesis fast.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SanDisk didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today. On CNBC's Squawk on the Street this morning, Jim Cramer said something he has spent a career telling viewers never to do.
He said that a stock that has risen several hundred percent can still be bought, that the run does not mean the opportunity is gone, and that the memory chip cycle has changed enough to make chasing it defensible. His words were, "I have never seen it pay to come in on top of a 500 percenter. And yet I actually think it's going to work." The stock he was defending is SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK), the flash memory business spun out of Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) in early 2025, which is up 591.34% year to date through August 14 and rose another 8.88% on Monday to $1,786.85.
Cramer's argument is bigger than a single call. He is saying a rule he has followed his entire career, that buying after a parabolic move destroys returns, does not apply here because the industry itself has been remade. That claim deserves to be taken seriously and tested.
The structural argument rests on contract discipline that did not exist in prior cycles. SanDisk closed fiscal 2026 with $20.25 billion in revenue, up 175.3%, $11.49 billion in free cash flow, and a GAAP gross margin of 84.6% in the fourth quarter. More importantly, CEO David Goeckeler has signed five New Business Model agreements, multi-year customer engagements backed by firm financial commitments.
Micron (NASDAQ:MU) has gone further, telling investors on its June 24 earnings call that it has signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements covering roughly 25% of revenue today and eventually about half, with $22 billion in customer deposits and financial commitments and approximately $100 billion in remaining performance obligations across 14 of those agreements. Sanjay Mehrotra said the agreements are structured as take-or-pay with binding volume commitments and floor prices that produce gross margins well above any prior peak. Prior memory cycles ended because customers overbought during shortages and suppliers overbuilt in response.
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