Western Digital, a top S&P stock over the last month, is attracting retail traders

Hey, don’t look now, but storage stalwart Western Digital appears to be making the leap from interesting stock to retail darling.

We’ve been covering the sudden sexiness of data storage as a market theme a lot recently, with Western Digital and Seagate Technology Holdings turning into top trades of 2025.

The makers of relatively affordable data storage devices known as hard disk drives were leading the S&P 500 until recently, when they were supplanted by an index newbie.

Western Digital, which has been trading at a discount to Seagate due to its spottier earnings record over the last couple years, seems to have suddenly found fans among the unwashed stock-trading masses.

Over in JPMorgan’s always informative Retail Radar note, analysts spotlighted “strong buying in WDC rally” Wednesday as traders climbed aboard a rally that has carried the shares up more than 60% over the last month.

At the heart of the turnaround is the fact that the companies — which took a beating during the worst of the tariff-related wobbles earlier this year — have been able to show Wall Street that they would have no problem dealing with any increased costs of imports thanks to the surge of demand for data storage.

The Takeaway

The superstars of the coming onslaught of data centers will be the Nvidia chips that constitute the brains of the operation, and Nvidia shareholders have been rewarded handsomely with windfalls from that positioning. But retail traders are not sleeping on the reality that all the bytes that those Nvidia chips crunch will have to reside somewhere, and that disk will probably be built by Western Digital or Seagate.