Stock A: Earning money in the A-share market proves your strength, luck, courage, competence, vision, understanding, and patience.

Earning money in the US stock market only proves that you invested in the US stock market.

This is the current situation for most people investing in US stocks in 2026.

Those who quietly bought US stock storage stocks, uninstalled their apps to take a break, and then one day logged back in to find their accounts had multiplied several times over.

Driven by the US stock market, storage stocks in the A-share market also began to take off.

Meanwhile, people in the cryptocurrency circle have shifted from chatting about memes and altcoins to discussing US stocks: "I live in the fear of the US stock market rising every day and BTC falling."

Newly opened accounts in group chats are questioning their souls: Why is it so easy to make money in the US stock market?

1. Who Is Really Benefiting from the US Stock Market Boom?

In 2026, the capital theme of the global market is clearly storage.

Sun Yuchen was the first to call for investing in the storage sector at the end of 2025.

According to netizens, if you bought US storage concept stocks when Sun Yuchen made the call:

If you invested in Micron, you would currently be +222%; if you invested in Seagate, you would currently be +256%; if you invested in Western Digital, you would currently be +280%; if you invested in SanDisk, you would currently be +515%.

If you had purchased SanDisk stock worth 500,000 RMB a year ago today, you would now have 15 million RMB.

What is storage all about?

A storage chip is a component in computers and smartphones responsible for retaining information, divided into two types: DRAM for short-term memory, used to temporarily store data during program operation; NAND for long-term memory, where your phone's photos and files are stored. When choosing between a 128GB and 256GB phone, the capacity refers to NAND.

There are no more than five companies globally capable of producing these two types of chips.

Here's how the stock prices of these five companies have increased over the past year:

SanDisk, which split from Western Digital in February 2025, an old company producing USB drives and SSDs, saw its stock price peak at 22 times its value.

Micron, a value stock that fund managers had shunned for a decade, saw its stock price surge over 550% in a year, and its gross margin increased from 18% to 56%. Apple, with a gross margin of about 43%, is already considered extremely profitable in the tech industry, but Micron's margin is now even higher than Apple's.

SK Hynix surged 123% this year, while Samsung rose 94%.

Seagate and Western Digital are both at all-time highs.

Then there's South Korea.

With Samsung and SK Hynix, which together account for over 30% of the South Korean KOSPI index, leading the charge, the Korean stock market soared by 76% in 2025, securing the top spot among major global indices for the year.

With the stellar performance of these two memory chip giants, an entire country's stock market followed suit.

Looking at prices more directly, DDR4 memory chips were priced at $1.45 at the beginning of 2025 and soared to a peak of $17 in February 2026, nearly a 12-fold increase in a year. A 16GB Kingston memory module from Huaqiangbei went from 200 RMB to 800 RMB. If you've recently found smartphones and computers more expensive, part of the reason lies in these few stocks you didn't buy.

In the first quarter of 2026, SK Hynix's net profit skyrocketed by 398%, with an operating profit margin of 72%. Samsung Electronics' overall operating profit surged by a staggering 755% year-on-year.

Selling a $100 memory chip, $72 is profit, and $28 is cost. This is no longer just doing business; this is mining.

II. Institutions Losing Rationality More Than Retail Investors

In a typical market scenario, institutions are those well-dressed, expressionless individuals who say, "We have a long-term positive outlook on the fundamentals," while retail investors are the ones shouting "Charge!" in online forums.

In the storage sector from 2025 to 2026, it was the institutions who first went crazy.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon began placing open-ended orders with Micron with "no price limit, no quantity limit."

These three words, "no price limit," are worth pondering. It means you quote a price, and I'll accept it, without bargaining. This procurement method usually appears in government arms purchases during wartime.

From 2025 to 2026, it appeared in tech companies buying memory modules.

Broadcom has locked in the supply for the next three years until 2028.

At an investor conference, SK Hynix stated, "The 2026 HBM capacity has already been sold out."

All. Year-round.

HBM is high-end memory specifically designed for use with AI chips. For every AI chip sold by NVIDIA, a corresponding HBM chip must be paired alongside. Globally, there are only three companies capable of producing HBM: SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron, with SK Hynix holding roughly 57% of the market share. "All sold out" means that in the entire year of 2026, one of the most critical components in global AI infrastructure will be in short supply.

Next up are the analysts.

Within three months, Wall Street has raised its consensus earnings per share forecast for SanDisk in 2026 by 172%. Citigroup predicts a 144% year-on-year increase in server DRAM prices in 2026. Nomura states that the super cycle will last at least until 2027, with significant supply additions not expected until 2028. After Micron's stock price has already risen by several hundred percentage points, Melius upgraded Micron to a buy rating, adding, without a blush or pant, "There is still a 41% upside potential in the next 12 months." Downright bold.

DeepMind CEO Hassabis publicly stated that the overall memory supply chain is constrained, limiting widespread AI deployment. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger mentioned that the memory shortage will not ease before 2028.

Then SK Hynix secretly submitted an application to the SEC to list American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on the U.S. stock market, aiming to raise up to $15 billion. A company that has sold out all its capacity and maintains a 72% profit margin decides to raise more funds in New York, citing that the valuation in the Korean market is too low and that U.S. investors understand AI better and are willing to pay a higher price.

The A-share market followed suit.

DeeMemory hit the limit up, Biwin Storage surged, JBL Technology rose by 41%, and small-cap Shannon Xinchuang announced a 6,714% to 8,747% year-on-year increase in net profit for the first quarter, a four-digit growth rate. The topic of financial group chats shifted from "Is it still worth investing in the SSE 300 Index" to "Should we invest in Micron or SK Hynix." People who didn't even know how to spell HBM two months ago are now explaining the working principle of high-bandwidth memory in the group chats.

Even in many blind date groups, storage stocks are being discussed.

III. The Most Ironic Scene

On February 24, 2026, Citron Research announced a short position on SanDisk, providing three reasons.

Firstly, storage is a cyclical stock. In 2008, 2012, and 2018, every high-profit period ended in a collapse. The existing capacity is already twice the peak in 2018, and supply release is only a matter of time.

Second, SanDisk sells commodities in bulk.

"NVIDIA has a moat, while SanDisk is just a commodity." NVIDIA's moat is the CUDA software ecosystem, where almost all global AI models run, making it highly costly to switch.

For SanDisk's solid-state drives, Samsung can replicate the same product by tomorrow, possibly even cheaper.

Third, the major shareholder Western Digital is significantly reducing its SanDisk holdings at a 25% discount to the market price.

Selling one's own stock at a 25% discount. Needing money urgently is one possibility, while another is speculating that the price will be even lower in the future. In both scenarios, neither indicates a bullish outlook.

After two trading days, SanDisk rebounded, subsequently hitting new all-time highs. Citron's report circulated in various financial groups and became a meme material.

One question that everyone skipped over: Who ended up with the stocks sold at a 25% discount?

Fourth, Making Money in the U.S. Stock Market: As Easy as Breathing?

When the world's top three most profitable storage companies were at their peak earnings, they collectively chose not to expand production.

SK Hynix saw a 50% year-on-year decrease in HBM-related capital expenditure for 2025, officially explained as a concern for oversupply in 2027. Samsung's 2026 DRAM capacity growth is only about 5%, far below the demand increase.

The industry's overall capital expenditure growth rate is only 14%, whereas in past economic expansion periods, it has typically been between 30% and 50%.

The three companies control 92% of the global DRAM capacity and have chosen not to expand production, a term known in any other commodity market as supply-side coordination. OPEC has done this with oil, leading to the 1973 oil crisis. The concentration in the memory chip market is even higher than OPEC; the combined market share of the three companies is higher than thirteen oil-producing countries put together.

Investors interpret "manufacturers' restrained production expansion" as a positive development, which is logically correct as prices can indeed be sustained for a longer time. However, what this structure means for the buyers on the other end is not addressed in any analyst reports.

This market boom can support two plausible narratives.

The first: AI's demand for storage is a structural shift. In the era of inferencing AI models, the need to remember increasingly longer contexts results in a magnitude leap in memory requirements. With the top three storage manufacturers controlling 92% of the production capacity and new factories not coming online until at least 2027, the gap will not disappear until then.

Secondly, as with every historical event, the narrative is always the same. The narrative of the 2000 Internet bubble was "the Internet changes everything," which was true. The narrative of the 2008 subprime crisis was "house prices will not experience a nationwide fall," which also made sense based on historical data at the time. The real issue has never been whether the story is right or wrong, but whether the price has priced in this story too early.

The storage industry has a rule that has stood for 30 years: prices rise slowly, and prices fall quickly.

In the supercycle of 2018, the price was cut in half from the peak in less than two quarters.

No one knows when the top of this cycle will be. This includes those who sold at a 25% discount, or rather, especially those who sold at a 25% discount because they were selling chips, which, when sold to those who believe in the story, is most effective.

The last time you bought a phone, upgrading from 128GB to 256GB cost you an extra three to four hundred bucks. These few hundred dollars went through an entire industry chain, with multiple layers of profit-sharing, but only a tiny fraction ended up in SK Hynix's 72% operating profit margin, in Samsung's 755% profit growth rate, and in all the stocks you did not buy.

And, of course, it eventually accumulates to when you open all your social apps and see others questioning the depths of their souls: How come the U.S. stock market is so easy to make money in?

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