Trade Alert: A Buying Opportunity In Memory Stocks
Taking advantage of the overdone war + TurboQuant concerns to add a bullish Top Names trade here. Plus: two more bullish trades from our Market Watchers list.
A Buying Opportunity In Memory Stocks
One question some readers may have right now is whether this is really a good time to buy anything. The headlines are still ugly. Oil and shipping risk remain in play. And every new development in the Iran war seems to bring a fresh round of predictions that markets are about to crack.
But as we wrote in last night’s Top Names post, the political signals still point toward a conflict measured in weeks, not months.
President Trump rescheduled his delayed summit with President Xi for May 14th-15th, extended his deadline for striking Iranian power plants by another 10 days, and said talks were going well and that the Iranians wanted to negotiate. There was also a secondhand report from Alexander Shokhin, the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, that Putin told business leaders in a closed-door meeting he expected the crisis would probably be resolved within the next three to four weeks. That doesn’t mean the path from here to there will be smooth. It does mean that, if your horizon is measured in months rather than days, this still looks more like a panic than the start of a permanently broken market. You can also see the broader context in yesterday’s trade alert.
Why Memory Stocks Sold Off
That brings us to memory stocks, which got hit Thursday after a new wave of excitement around Google’s TurboQuant sparked fears that AI systems may need less memory than investors had been assuming. Zero Hedge summed up the panic here, framing it as “Google’s DeepSeek moment.” That helps explain the violence of the move: once investors hear “DeepSeek moment,” they start selling first and asking questions later.
But several sharp voices on our Market Watchers X list pushed back on that panic almost immediately. Obsidian Capital noted that the supposedly shocking TurboQuant research had actually been published back in April of 2025. Zephyr, a Korean AI hardware analyst at Citrini Research, dismissed the idea that this was some brand-new revelation, and in another post pointed out that the market’s excitement over a KV-cache quantization method was overblown because real-world systems are already compressing memory usage far more aggressively than the panic implied. Jukan made the same point more bluntly, comparing the selloff in memory names to punishing an oil producer because an automaker built a better hybrid engine.
Why We’re Buying Here
That is what makes this setup interesting to us. You have a memory-stock selloff driven by a fresh “DeepSeek panic,” landing on top of a broader war panic that has already made investors more skittish than usual. If our base case is right—that the war gets resolved within the next month or so, and that the TurboQuant fears are overdone—then this starts to look less like the beginning of a durable downtrend and more like a buying opportunity.
A few memory-related names ended up in our Top Names on Thursday night. For readers who are newer here, Portfolio Armor’s Top Names have averaged 19.84% over the average of the last 144 completed 6-month periods since we started sharing weekly Top Names cohorts in late 2022, versus 9.91% for SPY over the same periods. You can see the running table on our Top Names performance page. Of the memory names that showed up there Thursday, we picked the one that also passed our falling-knives test—an RSI above 40 and a Chartmill Setup rating of 6 or better. And because implied volatility is elevated now thanks to both the TurboQuant scare and the war headlines, today’s options structure is designed to harvest some of that fear premium while giving us bullish exposure several months out.
Two Other Bullish Trades
We have two other bullish trades today as well. One is on an emerging-markets payments infrastructure company with strong growth, high retention, and a capital-light model. The other is on a semiconductor name tied to the Internet of Things and edge AI, where the underlying business has been recovering and the market still doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the longer-term opportunity there.
Today’s Top Names Trade
Memory / AI bottleneck theme
