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David Crowther & Claire Yubin Oh

Sandisk beat the entire S&P 500 in 2025… and it’s doing the same again this year

The New York Yankees. Italy’s national soccer team in the 1930s. The Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. The New England Patriots 22 years ago. Winning back-to-back titles etches your name in history.

And, though we’re only two weeks into the year, Sandisk is making a strong early case for its name to be added to the annals of stock market lore. After topping the S&P 500 Index with a whopping 559% total return in 2025, the stock is once again beating out around 500 of America’s largest companies this year too, already notching a 72% return since the calendars flipped. Sandisk is also up again in premarket trading on Friday.

Sandisk
Sherwood News

Back-to-back S&P 500 champ?

Though we have index-level data for the S&P 500 going all the way back to the 1920s (when it was a composite benchmark of far fewer names), getting comprehensive year-by-year returns of its constituents is a trickier business. But, from our research this morning, we found that no stock has ever managed to top the list twice in a row. That’s certainly the case in the modern era, though AppLovin made a strong defense of its 2024 title last year, finishing 11th with a 108% gain, while another AI-adjacent name, Palantir Technologies, came pretty close in both of the last two years. After gaining more than 350% in 2024, finishing second, Palantir led the index at various points last year, before Sandisk went parabolic to take the crown.

While other memory and storage companies like Western Digital, Seagate, and Micron have made serious gains, none have ripped as hard as SNDK.

Reemerging as a stand-alone company from Western Digital in February 2025, Sandisk’s focus on flash storage (specifically NAND) has made it an investor favorite as a pure-play company, benefiting from the enormous troves of data stored by hyperscalers to train and deploy their AI models — a need that is only likely to grow as adoption surges. Could Sandisk manage the back-to-back? The math (and the history) would suggest it’s very unlikely, even after a blistering start.

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Tasha Matsumoto
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GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN - DECEMBER 07: Caleb Williams #18 of the Chicago Bears walks off the field after a loss to the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field on December 07, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Photo by John Fisher/Getty Images)
Luke Kawa
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Oracle drops after report that it and OpenAI scrapped plans to expand a data center site in Texas

Nvidia helped line up Meta as a new tenant for the location.

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Max Knoblauch

Report: Boeing could unveil 500-jet order from China during Trump’s visit later this month

Shares of Boeing are up nearly 4% on Friday afternoon, following a Bloomberg report that the company could be close to finalizing a deal to sell 500 planes to China.

The deal was first reported in August and would be one of Boeing’s largest ever.

According to Bloomberg’s sources, the deal could be officially unveiled when President Trump travels to China at the end of the month. That trip could be delayed given the war in Iran. The deal, sources say, could still fall apart — similar language to when it was first reported on more than six months ago.

Boeing has been on the outside of the Chinese market, in terms of new orders, since 2019 amid escalating US-China trade tensions.

Boeing Close to 500-Jet Order With Trump-Xi Summit

Boeing Close to 500-Jet Order With Trump-Xi Summit

According to Bloomberg’s sources, the deal could be officially unveiled when President Trump travels to China at the end of the month. That trip could be delayed given the war in Iran. The deal, sources say, could still fall apart — similar language to when it was first reported on more than six months ago.

Boeing has been on the outside of the Chinese market, in terms of new orders, since 2019 amid escalating US-China trade tensions.

markets
Matt Phillips

Why software shares are withstanding the war jitters

The outbreak of the war in Iran has clearly rattled investors and created a few clear winners — mostly energy stocks — and losers — consumer staples, airlines, and, well, more or else everything else.

But there is one interesting outlier to that Manichaean market dynamic.

Software shares — often the same companies that the market was giving up for dead just a few weeks ago due to overexpectations of an AI-driven disruption — have been holding up remarkably well.

These companies, including Intuit, ServiceNow, Datadog, Snowflake, IBM, Workday, and Oracle, have actually had a pretty decent run since the war started with a combined US-Israeli attack on Iran last weekend.

A new note from RBC Capital’s Rishi Jaluria suggests this isn’t just a fluke. Looking at the performance of software stocks during periods of geopolitical stress and market volatility over the last 10 and 25 years, his team found that software shares appear fairly well insulated when these broader shocks hit. RBC wrote:

“The defensive nature of SaaS models and the mission-critical nature of many core software systems at the enterprise level (e.g., in the absence of mass layoffs that may create seat-based headwinds, geopolitical uncertainty and/or market volatility typically will not cause an enterprise CIO to consider ripping out their ERP, CRM, Cyber systems, etc.”

I briefly got Jaluria on the phone yesterday, and he explained a bit more about why he thinks investors might see software as a decent place to hide out from the current chaos.

“With everything in the Middle East, you have to think about not just oil and gas input prices but also supply chains,” he said. “With software, you’re not really thinking about that.”

In other words, there is no equivalent of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz that software investors have to worry about.

Others suggested that the near-term profitability of these giant software companies — aside from concerns about potential long-term disruption from AI — may look different in the face of the economic uncertainty that seems to be growing with the war, especially after a sell-off that has left them relatively attractively valued.

Mark Moerdler, who covers software stocks for Bernstein Research, says that while the AI worries are clearly real, software companies continue to be highly productive cash cows.

“Everyone is afraid that AI is a massive disruptor, and all these articles you read talk about AI as massive disruptor or the world is ending or whatever,” he said. “You don’t see it in the fundamental numbers of the companies I cover. They are delivering GAAP profits, free cash flow, and they’re good investment ideas.”

Max Knoblauch
13h
Jet fuel refining margins are surging to 20-year highs amid Iran war, threatening airlines

According to a Deutsche Bank note on Friday, airlines haven’t seen this phenomenon since the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Airlines Face Rapidly Rising Fuel Costs

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