These 10 Stocks Skyrocketed Last Year. Reddit Caught 7 of Them - Including MU and SNDK.

May 27, 6:06 am

The stock market over the past year produced a small handful of monster winners. Memory companies tied to AI infrastructure. A fuel cell maker. A satellite imagery stock. A drone communications name that was trading under a dollar last summer. The 10 biggest gainers all more than doubled. Several multiplied many times over. Micron went from $122 to $823. SanDisk went from $255 to $1,534.

Reddit was early on most of them.

AltIndex Research | May 2026 | MU, SNDK, BE, WDC, PL, AAOI, ONDS

We took the 10 largest gainers in the market over the past 12 months, filtered for a market cap above $100 million, and checked Reddit mention activity on each. On 7 of the 10, Reddit lit up while the stock still had a massive run ahead.

Hit Rate 7 / 10 Top gainers Reddit was loud on

Avg Return ▲ 271% From each stock's first mention spike

vs S&P 500 16x The basket beat the index by

The S&P 500 returned roughly 17% over the same period. A basket of the seven Reddit-flagged stocks, bought at each one's first mention spike, would have returned more than 270%.

The list

Here are the 10 biggest gainers in the market over the past year, ranked by total return. Every name has a market cap above $1 billion. The "Reddit Hit" column marks whether our database flagged a statistically significant Reddit mention spike during the year. Click any ticker to see the full data on AltIndex.

The pattern is striking. Of the seven Reddit hits, all seven are AI infrastructure plays. Memory (MU, SNDK, WDC), power (BE), satellite (PL), optical networking (AAOI), and AI-enabled drones (ONDS). The three misses are two clinical-stage biotechs (CELC, PRAX) and one semiconductor test equipment maker (AEHR) whose customers are hyperscalers but whose stock rarely surfaces in retail discussions.

What "Reddit was early" actually means

A stock being mentioned on Reddit is not the same as Reddit getting it right. Plenty of widely-known names get mentioned constantly without going anywhere. What we measure is something more specific: a statistical spike in mention volume above the stock's own historical baseline. That filters out background chatter and surfaces moments when the conversation around a stock genuinely accelerated.

For the seven names above, our system flagged anywhere from 6 to 38 spike events over the past year. Buying each stock at the date of its first spike, equal-weighted, would have produced an average return of 271%, with the S&P 500 returning about 17% over the same window.

Equal-weighted, a basket bought at each stock's first Reddit signal would have returned roughly 271%. The S&P 500 over the same period was up around 17%.

The MU example

Micron is the cleanest illustration. The stock was sitting at $95 in early June 2025. Reddit mentions averaged single digits per week. On June 21, 2025, our system flagged the first statistically significant mention spike: a 270% jump in a single day, with the stock trading at $122. Over the following months, mention volume kept building. By late September 2025, weekly mentions had hit 93. By December, they had crossed 127. By April 2026, peaks of 200+ per week.

The stock followed the same path, just on a delay. $122 in June. $250 by year-end. $400 by February. $823 today.

AltIndex Reddit Mentions vs Price, Micron (MU)

What's striking about the MU chart isn't just that mentions and price moved together. It's that mention volume started building before the price did. Through June and July 2025, the stock was choppy and rangebound between $108 and $125. The Reddit signal was already firing. By the time the broader market caught on in September, MU was up 30% from those summer levels. The next nine months added another 6x.

The SNDK case is even more recent

SanDisk spun off from Western Digital in February 2025. For most of the year, it traded between $40 and $60 with almost no Reddit attention. Mentions averaged 2-3 per week through Q4. Then, on January 3, 2026, our system flagged a 964% spike day. The stock was at $255.

The next 17 spike events landed in the following four months. Mentions peaked at 487 in a single week in May 2026. The stock went to $1,534.

"That's how I felt about SNDK. Ended up finally buying some over a month ago and I'm up almost 60% with thousands of dollars in gains. Better late than never."
r/stocks, May 26, 2026

AltIndex Reddit Mentions vs Price, SanDisk (SNDK)

This is the kind of signal that's almost impossible to act on without monitoring. Three Reddit mentions a week for a small-cap storage company isn't going to wake anyone up. A 964% spike in a single day is. That's the difference between scrolling Reddit and tracking Reddit.

The pattern holds across every AI infrastructure winner

MU and SNDK are the headline cases, but the pattern is not limited to two stocks. Of the past year's top 10 gainers, every single AI infrastructure name had Reddit firing while the stock still had room to run. Memory. Storage. Power. Satellite imagery. Optical networking. Drones. Seven for seven on the AI infrastructure trade.

This is the part of the data that should matter most to investors. Not that Reddit talked about MU. Everyone talked about MU. The point is that every stock in the year's most explosive theme had a Reddit signal that fired with money still on the table. If you were watching the signal, you were in. If you were not, you were one of the people posting "missed it by a day" in May 2026.

The other four hits

Bloom Energy is the highest-conviction Reddit name on the list. Mentions cluster around AI power and data center demand, two themes that started showing up on retail forums in mid-2025 as hyperscaler capex projections kept getting revised upward. Our first significant spike landed October 28, 2025 with the stock at $126. The fuel cell maker now trades above $300, with a market cap above $80 billion. A year ago, it was under $5 billion.

Planet Labs caught Reddit's attention around its government and defense contracts, especially after a string of NATO-aligned imaging deals announced in late 2025. The stock went from $3 to $46. Our first spike alert came in October at $15.

Western Digital and Applied Optoelectronics are the AI-adjacent picks-and-shovels stories. WDC benefits from the same memory cycle as MU and SNDK. AAOI makes the optical transceivers that connect AI clusters inside hyperscaler data centers. Both got picked up by Reddit as the broader AI infrastructure theme broadened beyond Nvidia.

The clearest signal of all: Ondas

Ondas is the most speculative of the seven, and probably the most quintessentially Reddit. A drone communications stock trading at $1.12 in May 2025, riding a thesis around military and commercial drone integration. There was almost no Reddit chatter on it through May, June, or July. Then on August 17, 2025, with the stock at $3.82, our system flagged the first mention spike. The conversation had started.

What happened next is the cleanest version of the pattern in the entire dataset. Mentions stayed elevated. The stock ran from $3.82 to over $10 within two months. A second spike landed in early January 2026 as the stock pushed to $13. Twenty-three separate spike events fired over the course of the year.

AltIndex Reddit Mentions vs Price, Ondas (ONDS)

What makes the ONDS chart different from MU and SNDK is the baseline. There was no prior Reddit attention to compare against. The signal didn't accelerate from a low level. It went from zero to firing, with the stock at $3.82 and 8x the run still ahead. Today ONDS trades at $9.76, more than 8x the price of a year ago, and the people who saw the first spike got in with most of that move still ahead of them.

Where Reddit didn't help

Three of the top 10 gainers had effectively no Reddit footprint: Celcuity, Praxis Precision Medicines, and Aehr Test Systems. The reason is structural, not random.

Clinical-stage biotechs run on binary trial data. The catalyst is usually a single readout that moves the stock 30-300% in a day. Retail forums don't tend to surface these names ahead of the catalyst because there's no thematic narrative to discuss, just trial timelines. The conversation happens on specialist biotech Twitter and trade publications, not r/wallstreetbets. CELC and PRAX both fit this pattern.

Aehr Test Systems is different. AEHR makes semiconductor burn-in test equipment, mostly used by silicon carbide and AI chip manufacturers. The customer list is institutional, the business is B2B, and the stock rarely shows up in retail discussions even when its end-market is the hottest theme in the market. This is a real limitation of Reddit as a signal: it tilts toward consumer-facing or thematically obvious names, and tends to miss companies whose customer base isn't visible to retail.

This is the part where we have to be honest. Reddit caught 7 of 10, which is a strong hit rate, but it caught zero of the biotechs and zero of the specialist equipment plays. If your portfolio is heavy in either of those buckets, you need other signals.

The bottom line

Reddit is not a magic stock-picking tool. It missed three of the top 10 gainers of the past year. But what it caught is more interesting than what it missed. Reddit was loud on every single AI infrastructure winner. It was loud on the year's two 500%-plus moves. It was loud on the under-a-dollar drone stock that ran to $10 in months. The average return from buying at each first signal was 271%, against an S&P 500 that returned 17%.

"Lmao I've been in since like 70 so watching people just now discover MU is wild."
r/wallstreetbets, May 26, 2026

That is the user every other Reddit poster is trying to be. The one who saw the conversation building and got in while the stock was still in the early innings. The difference between that user and the "missed it by 1 day" user wasn't conviction or capital. It was paying attention to the right signal at the right time.

The next MU is somewhere in the feed already. The question is whether anyone is watching.

Track Reddit mention spikes on AltIndex

We monitor Reddit mention volume on thousands of tickers and surface statistical spikes the day they happen. The same signal flagged MU, SNDK, BE, WDC, PL, AAOI, and ONDS months before the bulk of their runs.

Set up Reddit alerts →

Sources: AltIndex price data, AltIndex Reddit mention data, AltIndex market events feed. Stock prices are historical and for informational purposes only. This article does not constitute investment advice.

Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. AltIndex aggregates publicly available alternative data signals. Past signal performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.

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