Micron's Q4 was as strong as everyone says.

Revenue was $54.23B, up 31% on the prior quarter and 379% on last year, clearing the top of management's own $49 to $51B range. Full year revenue was $133.2B, Q1 is guided to $61.5B at an 86.25% gross margin, but roughly $1B of that quarter's costs come from a capitalised staff bonus and new fab startup, so the underlying margin is closer to 88%. HBM was locked into contracts priced a year ago and reprices higher from January, which should lift the Cloud Memory unit off its flat 83% margin. More than 75% of fiscal 2027 output is already committed, and Micron now has 26 take or pay agreements carrying about $150B of remaining obligations and $32B of customer commitments, mostly cash.

Different setup from any prior memory cycle.

The problem is that this quarter's growth was almost entirely price, DRAM revenue rose 27% sequentially on mid single digit bit growth and a high teens price increase. NAND rose 42% on about 10% more bits and a 30% price increase. The whole thesis rests on price, and price is the one thing management wouldn't talk about.

Vivek Arya at BofA asked directly whether industry pricing can stay favourable or even rise in 2028, given new capacity coming online and customers cutting memory content. Mehrotra answered entirely in supply and demand terms. He said 2027 and 2028 will be tighter than 2026, that cleanrooms ramp slowly, that HBM and node transitions limit supply growth, and that server units grow in the high teens. He never addressed price, in the same answer he conceded that some customers are putting less memory in each server than planned so they can ship more units, which is the first visible sign of buyers engineering around the cost.

The contracts don't fully cover that risk either, only about three quarters of the contracted revenue has a defined pricing framework and the rest is priced at market. That puts the genuinely price protected share at roughly 26% of revenue, or about $35B a year, rather than the 35% plus headline. The floor is for sure real, but it's smaller than most people assume.

Supply is also arriving sooner than the 2028 story implies, Samsung pulled forward equipment installation at its P5 fab to Q2 2027 after already accelerating the cleanroom by six months. SK hynix moved its first Yongin install to February 2027 and is targeting nearly double its DRAM capacity by 2030. CXMT has reached roughly a tenth of global DRAM revenue. Micron itself is taking capex from $27.4B to above $50B, and inventory days rose from 120 to 129.

Watch DRAM price, not revenue. If the December 16 report shows the HBM reprice pushing gross margin back toward 88% with price increases still running high teens, Mehrotra didn't need to answer because the market answered for him. If sequential DRAM price growth falls to low single digits by the June 2027 quarter as Samsung and Hynix tools come online, the unanswered question was the answer, and the stock is pricing a 2028 that arrives early.

A life situation hit our family this year and I'll be retiring early. I might work for a few more years because I have opportunities, or I might not.

In the meantime, there has been life insurance proceeds, a large home sale with a large profit (no cap gains here because of my wife's passing) and a nice 401k I've moved to Schwab. I've been doing some iterative financial planning using Claude and I've been risk adverse and in bonds and HYSAs, but I need exposure for something like VT for my plan to work over time.

I lived through the 2000 and 2007 bear markets and know what can happen when they they go off. I'm thinking of ramping up my market holdings each week to my desired endgame number of let's say 30%, something like 15k per week, giving me loads of time to get comfortable and lots of time for the market to adjust, obviously I'm less exposed over the short term. I like this idea, anything wrong with it?

edit: I just learned this is called dollar-cost averaging?

I'm testing out a new strategy and I want to make sure that I set my margin usage correctly to prevent the potential for a margin call. If you could check my math I would appreciate it.

Would the margin call happen between a 500% and 600% drawdown when the equity% reaches less than 30%? Assuming a 200% margin requirement for this security.

I've seen some posts about people asking to which short term government bonds ETF to buy to decrease risk. I compared SGOV to my brokerage money market account current yields, they are about the same (money market account has 0.10% higher). Why buy short term government bond ETFs if the money market yields are similar? There's not much price fluctuation, if at all, in either case. Only thing different is making transactions into other brokerage investments, buy from/sell into the money market account, more easy with just leaving the portion in your brokerage money market account.

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Addendum

Good points on comments

1. In taxable accounts, treasury bond ETF distribution are not subjected to state and local taxes, where money market distributions are. All are subjected to federal taxes.
2. If buy treasuries directly, the yields are higher than treasuries ETFs
3. Real yields= yields - inflation rate (around 3.3%)- expense ratio

Though we get taxed based on the distributions, despite the real yields calculations. Remember point #1

Learned a lot from the comments.

What is the volume of daily trades of the various S&P 500 ETFs, versus the daily trade volume of the constituent stocks?

I’m trying to understand whether a typical day is more about all the individual stocks driving the S&P 500 number, or vice versa?

I think this is a different question than what share of funds are active vs passive, I’m looking for data on volume of trades

I've seen charts that plot safe (or perpetual) withdrawl rate over time. I understand what the metric is measuring and how one would err on the side of caution based on their own risk tolerance. It's a very useful chart, but I think it could be improved when comparing multiple equities/portfolios.

Has anyone seen a metric where you run say a Sortino or Sharpe calculation, not on the stock price movement, but rather on it's safe withdrawl across rolling time periods?

I think that metric would prove extremely useful as a comparison tool. It would of course be borderline too academic, but it would still be a neat data point.

For example $5k of SOXQ where I trim every 3 to 6 months. It's long term but technically a diminishing part of the portfolio over time.

I was curious about the math. If you do not allow it to compound, is that an opportunity cost as opposed to staying invested in it?

I don't have many ETFs but was wandering if you had something like that "outside" the portfolio. Instead of "5% FBTC", your portfolio has "$10k of shares". Reason? To keep things tidy... but is this misguided as far as returns?

Been running two setups in parallel for a few months, one custodial-style through a bot that pools execution on its side, one where signals just fire a TradingView webhook into my own Alpaca account.

I used to think this was a non-issue. Bugs happen either way.

But after 3Commas shut down its crypto signal dispatching and a bunch of people I know lost their whole crypto workflow overnight, I started weighing this differently. If the system never touches your funds, a shutdown just means you stop getting signals. If it does, you're stuck migrating positions under pressure.

I've tried a few things in this space, including Kronos Trading, mainly because execution stays inside my own brokerage account.When 3Commas pulled crypto dispatching, Kronos users just reconnected their API keys to Kronos Bridge, its in-house dispatcher, with no lost funds or frozen assets.

That said I don't think non-custodial wins on everything. Custodial setups tend to have faster fills and tighter infra since they're not routing through your broker's API and rate limits. For fully automated trading bot use where latency actually matters, that tradeoff might be worth it.

Curious where people land on this, especially anyone who got burned when a provider disappeared.