MU Stock Loses Some Steam After Korea Chip Selloff — But Retail Is Eyeing Clean Rebound Above $1,000

Alphabet’s capex forecast raise and a hat tip from Elon Musk boosted sentiment for MU stock.

• MU stock, however, declined in overnight trading, tracking a sharp sell-off in the South Korean market.
• On Thursday, the S&P 500 posted its biggest drop in a month, while the Nasdaq fell for a third straight session to a more-than one-month low.
• Retail sentiment for MU and peer memory stocks was ‘bearish’ as of late Thursday, even as MU watchers increased sharply.

Micron Technology, Inc. posted its strongest one-day gain in nearly two months on Thursday, bucking a broad-based technology selloff and reinforcing optimism surrounding the red-hot memory-chip trade. The stock, however, gave back some of those gains in overnight trading, slipping nearly 3%.

Thursday’s move in the regular session was supported by a hat tip from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said on his company’s earnings call that Micron had provided a "very significant allocation" of memory chips on "reasonable terms" to the electric car maker.

KOSPI Selloff Disrupts Rally

MU stock plunged in the overnight session, tracking a sharp slide in South Korean equities led by Samsung and SK Hynix stocks. The move in U.S. semiconductor stocks has become increasingly bundled with KOSPI, which is heavily weighted toward chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix and has seen increased volatility lately.

The overnight move came despite chip peer Intel reporting a strong quarter. Its shares, too, pared early gains late in the night.

On Thursday, the benchmark S&P 500 logged its biggest drop in a month, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell for a third straight session to its lowest level in more than a month. The declines followed quarterly results from Alphabet and Tesla and reflected a dimming outlook for the tech sector, compounded by renewed pressure from an escalation in the U.S.-Iran conflict.

Retail View On Memory, Tech Stocks

Even as Micron stock has gained a healthy 16% this week so far, the retail sentiment has declined steadily and was ‘bearish’ as of late Thursday. The sentiment for peer memory stocks SanDisk and Western Digital was also in the ‘bearish’ zone, while the sentiment for Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) dipped to ‘extremely bearish.’

Notably, Micron watchers have risen 3.7% over the past month and 12.2% in the past three months. At 202,923 watcher count, MU is one of the most watched tickers on Stocktwits.

“$MSFT $MU $AMZN Investors and traders seem to forget that the market doesn’t trade on past earnings or price. The market trades 6 to 18 months ahead. Given that, the chips are pricing for 2027 and 2028 numbers, once that cyclical part is done, what’s the next phase? The cloud names, the actual growth on cloud capacity,” a trader argued, making a case for Big Tech stocks.

“The semiconductor space is too volatile, that’s a tell of peak status. The reason those names are actually delivering earnings is based on increased prices not volume. You can only raise prices so much. Eventually those investors and traders will see the cheap valuation in names like Microsoft, Google and others,” they said.

Traders are intensely focused on Micron's persistent battle to break through and hold the $1,000 resistance level, which it fell below on July 2. Others were discussing the overnight sell-off, and one wrote, “$DRAM just a straight line down all night in Korea.”

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