MU is up 28% on the week and closing in on $900 — and the analyst community is still catching up to the price.
The most striking development this week is the sheer scale of target revisions. Barclays raised its target to $1,175 this morning, from $675. That's a 74% lift in a single action, with the Overweight rating held. A day earlier, UBS went further — taking its target from $535 to $1,625, the most aggressive number on the Street. Both moves follow a cluster of upgrades from Citigroup and Melius Research last week, when targets moved from the $400-$700 range into four digits. The consensus mean now stands at $653, well below where the stock is trading at $895.88, which means the mean is being anchored by stale lower targets. The bullish framing remains consistent across firms: AI-driven HBM demand, data center SSD momentum, and Micron's competitive position in next-generation memory. Earnings next arrive on June 24.
Options traders are more cautious than the price action implies. The put/call ratio jumped to 1.26 on Tuesday, nearly 2.7 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 1.15 — the most defensive options skew in roughly a year. That's a notable divergence from a stock that just gained 19% in a single session. Whether that reflects hedging by existing holders or fresh downside positioning is unclear, but the options market has visibly tilted toward protection as the stock approaches a valuation stretch.
Short interest tells a different, far less charged story. At 3.3% of the free float, short positioning is light and drifting lower — down around 1% on the week. Availability is at maximum — the lending pool has far more shares than anyone is borrowing, with no friction whatsoever for would-be shorts. Cost to borrow has picked up from its recent lows to around 0.40% but remains negligible in absolute terms. There is no squeeze dynamic here. The bears are not fighting this move.
Valuation is where the tension sharpens. The trailing P/E has expanded to around 11.7x, up roughly 4.4 points over the past month as the price has ripped higher. Price-to-book is now above 6x, adding 2.3 points over the same period. EV/EBITDA has climbed too, though it remains contained near 8.9x. The bear case centres on precisely these dynamics: heavy capex commitments, DRAM cyclicality, and a stock price that has now outrun forward earnings growth — the 12-month forward EPS year-on-year increase has flipped negative at -37%, meaning consensus expects earnings to decline from last year's elevated base. The 90-day EPS momentum factor ranks in the 97th percentile, but that reflects where estimates were moving, not where they end up.
Peers moved firmly higher alongside MU this week but without the same magnitude. AMD gained 19.7% and SYNA added 23.8%, while INTC rose 14.2% and LRCX climbed 16.1%. The outlier to the downside was MRAM, off 1.9% — the only peer to finish in the red. The broad semis rally gave MU a rising tide, but its 28% weekly gain still leads the peer group by a wide margin.
The June 24 earnings date is now the focal point. After the last print in March, the stock fell 3.8% the next day and 17.2% over the five days that followed — a reminder that a strong run into results does not guarantee a clean reception.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open MU on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
