Top 20 US Stock Trading Volumes on August 7: Sandisk's earnings guidance is weak, leading to target price downgrades by Citigroup and other brokerages

On Thursday, Micron Technology, the top stock in U.S. trading volume, closed down 1.31% with a transaction volume of $31.03 billion. The memory chip sector in the U.S. generally declined on Thursday, following target price cuts for SanDisk by Citigroup and Jefferies.

SpaceX, ranked second, rose 6.14% with a transaction volume of $27.925 billion. The stock partially recovered from the losses incurred on Wednesday. In news, SpaceX announced plans to build its own power plant to support its collaboration with Tesla on a large-scale semiconductor manufacturing facility in Texas. Riley Trettel, responsible for SpaceX's energy and data center development, stated at a public meeting in Grimes County, Texas on Wednesday: "We will generate our own power. We will build a natural gas power plant while also constructing a massive battery array to store electrical energy."

Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter predicts that SpaceX's capital expenditures will increase to $65 billion next year, up $17 billion from previous estimates; simultaneously, the target price for SpaceX was lowered from $156 to $140, maintaining a "neutral" investment rating.

NVIDIA, ranked third, closed down 0.20% with a transaction volume of $24.868 billion. According to media reports on Thursday, NVIDIA is considering reducing the high bandwidth memory configuration for the Rubin Ultra graphics processor.

Additionally, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the official launch of the open-source model Alpamayo 2 Super for autonomous vehicles, which will serve as a strong pillar for models such as autonomous taxis, trucks, shuttles, delivery vehicles, and tractors in long-tail scenarios.

SanDisk, ranked fourth, closed down 6.81% with a transaction volume of $23.947 billion. Citigroup analyst Asiya Merchant lowered the target price for SanDisk from $250 to $210, maintaining a buy rating. On the same day, Jefferies cut SanDisk's target price from $300 to $175. Previously, SanDisk disclosed that its Q4 fiscal year 2026 earnings report showed stronger-than-expected performance, but the earnings guidance was weak.

Analysts believe that the key reason for SanDisk's stock price decline is not the Q4 performance itself, but rather the company's revenue guidance for the current fiscal quarter, which fell below market expectations, with the adjusted EPS guidance range landing close to market expectations. The gross margin guidance remained roughly flat quarter-over-quarter, showing signs of peaking.

Microsoft, ranked fifth, rose 2.54% with a transaction volume of $17.527 billion. On Thursday, Microsoft launched its largest data center in India in Hyderabad, with Adani Group and HDFC Bank becoming early users of the project.

The opening of this data center in central-southern India expands Microsoft's cloud service regions in India to four. Along with the already operational data centers in Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai, it further solidifies Microsoft's position as the largest cloud computing service provider in India.

AMD, ranked seventh, rose 1.50% with a transaction volume of $11.795 billion. Rosenblatt Securities raised AMD's target price from $665 to $700 on Thursday.

Western Digital, ranked twelfth, closed down 13.03% with a transaction volume of $7.275 billion. Both SanDisk and Western Digital delivered strong quarterly results, but Goldman Sachs believes that overly high market expectations have made it difficult for the stock prices of both companies to benefit from their impressive performance BNP Paribas raised the target price for Western Digital from $660 to $700.

Applovin, ranked 18th, fell 19.66%, with a transaction volume of $5.163 billion. The financial report showed that for the second fiscal quarter ending June 30, AppLovin achieved revenue of $1.92 billion, a year-on-year increase of 53%, but still below the consensus estimate of $1.94 billion from analysts. The adjusted earnings per share were $3.76, slightly exceeding the market consensus of $3.75. Net profit reached $1.27 billion, a significant increase of 55% compared to $820 million in the same period last year; the adjusted EBITDA was $1.61 billion, a year-on-year increase of 58%. However, what raised market concerns was that this report not only failed to outperform Wall Street expectations but also fell short of AppLovin's own internal guidance.

Co-founder and CEO Adam Foroughi admitted during the conference call that the company's game-focused advertising business is highly dependent on the performance improvements of its AI models. Each substantial iteration of the model allows advertisers to invest more budget while maintaining target advertising spend return rates. However, in the recently concluded second quarter, this leap in model performance did not materialize as expected.

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