by Daniel Shvartsman
Investing.com - Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) traded up 4.75% on Wednesday, nearing both its 52-week and all-time highs, as the market continued to relish the company's strong earnings report from Monday.
Micron shares traded hands at $94.65/share in Wednesday action, just shy of the $96.94 52-week high and Micron's all-time high of $97.50 from July 2000.
Micron's earnings report saw them beat on both revenue and EPS both for their Fiscal year Q1 and for their guidance to the next quarter. It led to a spate of price target increases and a couple upgrades, from Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Summit Insights. Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS)' analyst wrote, "We expect healthy DRAM/NAND content growth across the major applications as well as supportive supply-side dynamics (i.e. disciplined industry capex, equipment constraints, more marginal bit growth from technology transitions than in the past) to drive a cyclical recovery in 2022."
Guidance was the headline stealer, as Wedbush's analyst Matthew Bryson pointed out: "Micron surprised us and the Street by providing robust guidance that suggests both Micron and the memory market are nearing a very shallow cyclical trough rather than the harsh wintery downturn some had projected."
Micron is a popular value investor pick in the semiconductor space and often trades in rapidly cyclical fashion. With the pent-up demand and supply chain issues surrounding semiconductors more generally, the question of whether memory demand will sustain had weighed on shares, and the guidance and general Christmas-week quiet has allowed Micron to re-test its all-time heights.
The trading came amidst general semiconductor bullishness, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) up 1.3%, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) up 1.3%, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) up 1.1%, and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) up 3%.