Shares of Seagate Technology, the hard-drive maker, have gained 718% in a year, and analysts at Morgan Stanley, who call it a top pick, are scrambling to keep their expectations high enough. “For the third quarter in a row, our prior bull case is becoming our new base case,” they wrote this past week. Hard drives capture about 80% of cloud storage, and are made by a disciplined oligopoly. Demand for them, writes Morgan Stanley, is riding “exponential” AI growth and getting support from a “parabolic” increase in flash memory prices. (I’m OK, thanks. It helps to breathe deeply while reciting the quadratic formula.)
