SNDK
Tepper hit the brakes
David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management did what a lot of investors wish they had the nerve to do: it sold SanDisk after a monster run, then watched the stock roll over anyway.
The fund’s latest 13F shows it completely exited its 281,250-share stake in SanDisk during the second quarter. That filing only tells us what Appaloosa owned on June 30, not the exact day it sold, so no, this isn’t a magical crystal-ball trade. But the timing still looks sharp, because SanDisk had been ripping on AI memory demand and later fell more than 30% from its late-June peak.
The 13F caveat nobody likes
Here’s the annoying-but-important part: a 13F is a quarter-end snapshot, not a trade log. Tepper could’ve sold near the start of the rally, the middle, or after the stock had already gone parabolic. The form doesn’t spill the tea.
Still, the move says a lot about risk management. When a stock is up more than 200% in a quarter, the question stops being “is this business good?” and becomes “how much of this optimism is already baked in?”
Micron got trimmed too
SanDisk wasn’t the only memory name Appaloosa touched.
- Micron was cut by about 41% instead of being dumped entirely.
- That suggests Tepper was dialing back exposure to a sector that had gone full caffeine-fueled sprint.
- Translation: he wasn’t chasing the last dollar of upside; he was taking some chips off the table.
Big picture
For investors, the lesson isn’t to copy Tepper’s exact move. It’s to remember that even the hottest AI-linked trade can turn into a roller coaster fast. And once a stock has already had a historic run, the next question is usually not “can it go higher?” but “what could possibly make it stay there?”