Lisa Su Called the Market ‘Short-Sighted’ as AMD Crashed 17%. Two Sessions Later the Stock Has It All Back

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) has won back everything Thursday’s 17% crash took, and more. The stock closed up 13% at $508.58 on Monday, adding nearly $100 billion in market value, after Oppenheimer upgraded it to Outperform with a $600 price target and AMD said its EPYC processors will run the host side of Google Cloud’s new TPU 8tx systems. The same morning Nvidia fell as much as 8.8% and closed down 4.3%, a drop worth about $192 billion of market value, a day after its board opened an independent investigation into reports about chief executive Jensen Huang.

Lisa Su, AMD’s chair and chief executive, had spent Thursday watching her stock fall 17.26% to $404.40 in the worst day for chip stocks since 2020. Asked about it on Yahoo Finance that afternoon, she said: “I think the market can sometimes be a little bit short-sighted. It is what it is.” Two sessions later the stock is up 25.8% from that close and back above the $488.78 it closed at before the crash.

Monday’s rally reads as a signal that the market has moved to Su’s side of the argument, at least for now: an upgrade, a Google contract and a rival’s bad day all landed on the same morning. The limit is that one day settles nothing, and a stock that fell 17% in a session on Thursday can do it again. What matters for you, if you hold AMD, is what the move did to your position and what to do with a gain this size.

Take a 67-year-old retired engineer who bought 1,000 AMD shares on Oct. 14, 2022, at $55.94, the stock’s lowest close of that year, for $55,940. He holds them in a taxable brokerage account. The rest of the couple’s savings is $1.9 million: a $1.5 million rollover IRA, a $200,000 Roth and $200,000 in an index fund and cash. He and his wife, 64, collect $60,000 a year in Social Security and draw $60,000 from the IRA.

What Monday did to the position

At Friday’s close the 1,000 shares were worth $449,040. At Monday’s close they were worth $508,580, a gain of $59,540 in one session and $104,180 in two. The shares cost $55,940, so the unrealized gain is $452,640, and the position is worth 9.1 times what he paid.

Two numbers frame the decision, and you can run them on your own position. At the Oct. 6 record close of $649.42 the shares were worth $649,420, so even after Monday he is $140,840 below the peak. And at the end of last year, when AMD closed at $214.16, the position was worth $214,160 and 10% of the couple’s money. At Monday’s price it is 21% of a $2,408,580 portfolio. He did nothing, and one stock doubled its share of his retirement.

What the upgrade is worth, and what a repeat of Thursday would cost

Oppenheimer’s Rick Schafer upgraded AMD to Outperform from Perform in a note dated Sunday, with a $600 target that was 34% above Friday’s close. He models data center revenue growing 135% next year and cited AMD’s third quarter, reported Nov. 3: revenue of $13.4 billion, up 45%, data center revenue of $8.5 billion, up 97%, and a fourth-quarter outlook of about $17 billion, plus or minus 3%. On that call Su said she expects 2027 revenue growth above 80%.

By Monday’s close the stock had covered 39% of the distance from Friday’s close to $600, and the upside left to the target was 18%. For the holder, $600 would make the 1,000 shares worth $600,000, another $91,420. A repeat of Thursday’s 17.26% drop from Monday’s price would cost $87,798 in a day. The two sides of that trade are now about the same size, and the second one has already happened twice this year.

What history says after a 17% day

AMD has closed down 15% or more in a single session 19 times since 2000, counting Thursday. Two of those came this year. On Feb. 4 the stock fell 17.3% on its outlook, then rose 110% over the next three months. Across the 18 earlier drops, the stock was higher six months later in 12 cases, with a median gain of 23%. Three months out it was a coin flip: higher in 9 of 18, with a median gain of 7%. The misses were real. The four drops of 2000 to 2002 that came before the dot-com low, the September 2008 drop and the July 2014 drop each left the stock 29% to 39% lower six months on.

Monday’s two-session gain of 25.8% is also rare. AMD had done that 15 times since 2000 before today, most recently on Oct. 7, 2025. If you are counting on the pattern, the record says big drops in this stock are usually followed by big recoveries, and that when they are not, the losses run for months. It says nothing about which kind Thursday was.

The tax bill if he sells

Selling all 1,000 shares at $508.58 realizes a long-term gain of $452,640. Stacked on the couple’s $60,000 IRA withdrawal and their Social Security, 85% of which becomes taxable, that puts 2026 adjusted gross income at $563,640. Under the 2026 brackets, $21,750 of the gain falls in the 0% capital gains bracket and $430,890 is taxed at 15%, for $64,634. The 3.8% net investment income tax adds $11,918 on the part of the gain above $250,000 of income. The sale adds $77,980 to the couple’s federal tax, 17.2% of the gain, and leaves $430,600 in cash after tax. Two years later Medicare would read that income and charge each of them $649.20 a month for Part B instead of $202.90, a surcharge of $10,711 for the year.

Selling 530 shares, which brings AMD back to 10% of the portfolio, realizes $239,899. That is the trim most advisers would start with if your position doubled its weight the way his did. The federal tax on that sale is $37,985, including $3,834 of net investment income tax, and the Part B surcharge two years later is $7,790 for the couple.

Selling 265 shares this year and 265 in January realizes $119,950 in each year. Each sale costs $15,849 in federal tax and no net investment income tax, because income stays under $250,000. Over the two years the tax is $31,699, which is $6,286 less than selling 530 shares at once, and the Part B surcharge is $1,949 a year, because income of $230,950 crosses only the first $218,000 line.

Where this plan is weak

The history above is AMD’s, and AMD is one company whose shares lost more than half their value in the year after four of those 19 drops. The tax figures you see here use 2026 rules for both years, and the 2027 brackets will be a little wider. Medicare looks back two years, so a sale in 2026 sets the 2028 premium, and the lines will have moved by then. None of this counts state tax, which you should add for your own state. And the stock could keep going: a holder who sold at $404 on Thursday missed $104,180 of recovery on 1,000 shares in two sessions.

The bottom line

Monday gave this holder $59,540 and the market’s agreement with Lisa Su, for a day. It also left him with 21% of his retirement in one stock that has moved 17% in a session twice this year. Selling 265 shares now and 265 in January takes the position back to 10%, keeps the net investment income tax at zero, holds the Medicare surcharge to $1,949 a year, and leaves 470 shares to ride toward $600 if Oppenheimer is right. If you hold a position like his, the question Monday asks is how much of one company’s good day you can afford to give back.

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