Kim Bolton Western Digital WDC-Q PAST TOP PICK May 21, 2025

He owned Western Digital a few years ago. He still follows it, but finds there are other players, like Juniper or Cisco, who are better investments today.

China is building out its own technology hardware industry. China was the biggest net importer relative to their needs and will now displace US market share. This is a trade that you buy when it is weak. Don't add fresh money. He would prefer TSM-N.

Yes, shares have rallied 47% this year, but shares were also cut in half compared to 2021. Memory has been a difficult in the semis space. WDC isn't pure quality, and momentum is positive long-term.

He just bought it after watching it for a while. He also owns Micron which is making new highs today. WDC termindated a merger earlier this year, but they spun off Sandisk which has done well. Also, WDC had been and will restructure their debt. Good. With rates coming down, this sets up WDC to perform well in the future.

A boring stock that's taken off. Niche of data storage and management. Carving out a position in infrastructure with edge computing. Still decent runway from here. No dividend.

Storage solutions in the tech space. A smaller company compared to the biggies in the semiconductor space. No dividend. Wildly cyclical and volatile. A trade, not something his firm typically does.

When ASML reported its disappointing memory-chip earnings, he sold this one as a result. This business is so very cyclical; once sold off, takes anywhere from 2-6 quarters to come back.

ASML also talked about how China has built out facilities for memory chips. So, another supply of memory chips that will influence cyclicality in the space.

It's seen many upgrades recently.

After the spinoff of the flash drive business, this is now a hard drive disk business. Over time, solid-state drives have taken away from hard drive disks in modern computers. That's been a challenge for the storage companies. 

But AI has increased need for mass capacity storage at data centres, and those are hard drive disks. Tailwind for WDC. His firm tends to stay away from hardware in general. In AI, there are much cleaner stories with less cyclicality. He can't either recommend or criticize a buy on this one.