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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Six months ago, SanDisk shares were trading hands at around $45 a pop, giving the memory-maker — spun out of Western Digital a few months earlier — a market cap of about $6bn. The sellside saw this as a little cheap, with a consensus 12-month price target just shy of $51.

Citi, for example, had initiated coverage of the memory-maker a week or so earlier with a target price of $57, its analysts writing:

We do remain mindful of the potential for foreign competition and macro dynamics/tariff pull-ins, which could weigh on overall demand, paired with the highly cyclical nature of and volatile pricing in the NAND industry.

Today, SanDisk shares are about $665 a pop, following a roughly 1,500 per cent rally, and the sellside now thinks they could be worth nearly $700. The company is inches from a $100bn valuation, having added another 15 per cent on Monday.

Which raises a question: has the sellside ever before needed to adjust its price target for a large company this quickly? The short answer, at least within the scope of data FT Alphaville can access is this: no.

In an attempt to measure this, we looked at Bloomberg’s daily “BEst target price” (BEst = Bloomberg Estimated) for all the current S&P 500 members, going back to the start of 2007 (as far as we could export). This metric is an average of all 12-month price targets tracked analysts have released for the stock in question, excluding any estimates that are more than three months old. We then measured the six-month change in this metric.

This approach is going to have some problems:

• It only covers the past two decades — missing the dotcom bubble (although as far as we can tell Bloomberg’s target price data gets thin further back anyway).

• It only covers companies that are currently in the S&P 500.

• It suggests that rapidly changing a price target as a share price changes is wrong, which it kind of isn’t.

• [Insert long screed about how a price target is a small and overemphasised part of the services a sellside analyst offers to clients.]

• [Insert other caveats here.]

But yeah, SanDisk is in a league of its own (NB this chart has a lot of data in it, so might take a moment to load):

As mentioned above, there’s a chicken-and-egg situation here given analysts could hardly not change their forecasts once SanDisk’s share price (and the memory sector) started going crazy. But it’s still pretty special.

Further reading:
— The memory market melt-up is only getting wilder