Short-seller Andrew Left's New Target Is A Memory Stock He Says Investors Are Wrongly Valuing Like It's The Next Nvidia

• Short-seller Andrew Left revealed a new bet against SanDisk.
• He thinks the company is being valued like Nvidia, which he sees as a mistake.
• His bearish take centers on competition from tech titan Samsung.

Andrew Left thinks he sees a big mismatch between investor perception and reality when it comes to SanDisk stock.

SanDisk has been on a tear, surging more than 1,200% in six months as the market eyes a shortage of memory capacity that's driving up pricing power for companies in the space. Yet, Left thinks the stock is highly overvalued, laying out in an X post why his firm, Citron Research, is shorting the shares.

Left has expressed skepticism that certain tech stocks can continue to rally, citing fellow AI standout Palantir as another example of an overhyped and overvalued name. He used a different company to illustrate the problem he sees with SanDisk, though.

"The market is pricing SanDisk like it's $NVDA," Left wrote.
"There's one problem: NVIDIA has a moat. SanDisk sells a commodity. We've seen this movie before 2008, 2012, 2018. It's never different this time. Memory is a cycle, and cycles peak."

SanDisk, Left says, is particularly vulnerable to competition from Samsung, which he calls the "800-pound gorilla" that's been in the space for 30 years.

Left's post comes as markets reprice certain AI trades, with a brutal sell-off in recent weeks hammering many tech sectors.

But in his view, the bigger problem isn't new companies disrupting the space, but a bigger incumbent muscling into SanDisk's territory. Left thinks Samsung will ultimately flood the industry with lower-cost memory chips, leaving SanDisk unable to compete.

"They're not just the capacity gorilla anymore," Left said, of Samsung. "They're going after SanDisk's best customers with cheaper, newer technology. And the only thing keeping supply tight right now? Samsung's temporary yield problems in another product line.
That bottleneck has an expiration date."

When it reaches that inflection point, Left expects SanDisk stock to start trading at lower levels, though he has not specified a price target.

"Shorting [SNDK] is skating to where the puck is going," he wrote. "By the time the cycle normalizes, this stock will already be much lower.

Left isn't the only finance pro who sees it as an effective short play. Former JPMorgan quant chief Marko Kolanovic posted on Monday that bets against memory chip stocks are likely to pay off, naming SanDisk as a specific example.