SanDisk Earnings Preview: A 34% Drop and Short Sellers Who Aren't Biting

SNDK reports Wednesday evening after losing a third of its value in a month, one of the sharpest declines the pure-play NAND storage company has seen since its spin-off. The stock closed Friday at $1,238, down 4.7% on the week, against a median weekly move of roughly -0.3% across its closest peers including WDC and STX. What makes the setup unusual is that short sellers have not returned despite the collapse in price.

Short interest has drifted higher over the past week, up about 5% to 3.47% of the free float, but remains nearly 13% below where it was a month ago. The borrow market reinforces that picture: availability runs at roughly 4,054%, meaning more than 40 shares are loanable for every one currently borrowed, and cost to borrow has fallen 73% over the past week to just 0.13%. That is a lending market with no stress in it whatsoever. Options positioning has also eased slightly from the defensive stance seen earlier in October. The put/call ratio is running at 1.14, now below its 20-day average of 1.21, a modest but notable shift toward less hedging into the print given what the stock has done.

The analyst community is largely constructive but at price targets well above where the stock now trades. Mizuho raised its target to $2,050 in early October, Rosenblatt initiated at Buy with a $2,400 target in late September, and JPMorgan reinstated at Overweight following the August results. The consensus mean target sits at $2,144, implying around 73% upside from current levels. The bull case rests on the datacenter business, where revenue rose 437% in fiscal 2026 to $5.15 billion, and on management's framework for mid-to-high-teens revenue growth with operating margins approaching 75% by fiscal 2028-2030. Bears point to NAND's structural cyclicality: the company itself has flagged oversupply risk, weaker enterprise SSD demand and pricing pressure as live threats, while the consumer segment, $2.94 billion in FY26 revenue, faces an expected decline to around $2.3 billion in FY27.

The insider register adds a note of caution. The 90-day net position shows roughly 75,000 shares sold for a combined value of about $117 million, the largest transactions coming from Chairman and CEO David Goeckeler, who sold over $10 million worth of stock on September 17 under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans. Planned sales carry less weight as signals than discretionary ones, and these were filed in advance. The Chief Legal Officer also made smaller open-market disposals in October. No buying has been recorded in the window.

The earnings history underscores how binary the reaction has been: the last four prints produced single-day moves of +22%, +17%, -12% and -12%. The October 29 report will test whether the datacenter revenue story can hold its shape in a quarter where pricing headwinds are widely acknowledged and the stock has already been heavily repriced.