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The grandaddy of all short squeezes (in dollar terms) stopped an inch shy of the 503.69 target we've been using. It looks like 'our' target got front-run on the intraday charts, but the view shown, of the daily chart, 'feels' like the target will be achieved. In any case, we should be ready to get short there, especially subscribers who have made money on the way up using my crazy-bullish targets. This should be done with a tight stop-loss, preferably tied to a small-pattern ('camouflage') trigger, since we've become used to seeing this stock vaporize Hidden Pivots made from inch-thick titanium. I consider this unlikely, but the pattern itself is probably too obvious to give us our top precisely where we want it. ______ UPDATE (Jul 4, 12:55 p.m. EDT): Some subscribers were able to get long just ahead of the stock's engineered, lunatic leap this morning using a Hidden Pivot correction target I'd disseminated earlier.  Visit the chat room for details. ______ UPDATE (Jul 4): Technical signs remain persuasive that the stock will make a potentially important top at or near 503.69, a Hidden Pivot resistance nine months in the making.  This warrants laying out shorts at or near the target -- either via purchasing puts when MSFT gets there; or, preferably, naked-shorting soon-to-expire, at-the-money calls with a tight stop-loss.

Sellers savaged the 3313.20 midpoint support with such ease last week that the futures are likely to continue down to at least p2=3231.60. And if they fail to get a strong bounce from that Hidden Pivot, expect the correction to hit D=3150.00. An additional possibility is that the turn will come from near the middle of the gap between p and p2, or between p2 and D. Unfortunately, the only way one can trade that scenario with risk tightly controlled is to watch for the turn on a chart of every small (i.e., one- or two-minute) bar chart. And here's one more possible bottom-fishing opportunity for Pivoteers who know how to craft a low-risk trigger: 3253.30, a voodoo number. ________ UPDATE (Jul 2, 1:19 a.m.) The futures opened on a gap down to 3250.50 on Sunday afternoon, triggering a long entry at 3257.60. (The 'reverse' used to fashion the trigger can be found on the 30-min chart, where a=3266.50 on 6/27 at 9:00 a.m.) The pattern, the only one available, could not have produced a losing trade, but it triggered at a time of day when relatively few would have been watching. I have not established a tracking position because no one reported getting long.

Is this rally for real? We'll probably have our answer this week, since this vehicle will either vault above the 'external' peak at 88.21 (see inset), or it will chicken out and pull back to form a distinctive low before taking a running start. The first scenario would be more bullish, but the second would be no disqualifier. In either case, we'll monitor minor ABCD retracements, since they should not reach 'D'  if the rally is going to continue.  Correspondingly, ABCD rallies of minor degree should easily surpass p midpoints, and even D targets, for the bull to remain healthy. These rules should hold true even for patterns that play out in an hour or less on the one-minute chart.  FYI, the most immediate target for a tradable pullback low is 86.42 (assuming 88.16 is not exceeded first; that would shift the target higher). _______ UPDATE (Jul 2, 1:38 a.m. EDT): Buyers easily surpassed the external peak at 88.21, creating a fresh impulse leg and clearing the way for a new leg up to 88.86.  This ETF proxy for long-term Treasurys is rising because foreign money has been flowing copiously into the U.S. Trump has put America into ascendance, and the trend is just getting rolling. It helps that Europe is a basket case.

The S&Ps and Nasdaq hit record highs last week, a surreal milestone that only the Wall Street toadies at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal who fabricate the news could take seriously.  These are the same folks who bestowed the name 'Magnificent Seven' on a bunch of high-flying stocks whose short-squeeze histrionics qualify them for membership in a stock-market Hall of Shame. Portfolio managers, who surely know better, are go-along buyers at these heights and will remain so until a tsunami of redemptions bends them to the impending reality of massive deflationary write-downs when the Everything Bubble bursts. That reality darkened last week with news that the U.S. economy shrunk at an annualized rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter.  Perennially giddy investors would seem to be betting either that the recession that probably already has begun will be short, or that the statistic itself is a meaningless outlier caused by the world-class uncertainties of Trump's tariff policies. A popular explanation for the staying power of the bull market against a backdrop of global storm clouds, geopolitical mayhem and economic sclerosis is that AI will save us from...everything. As the story has it, artificial intelligence will boost worker productivity, improve outcomes from brain surgery, make steering wheels obsolete, turn $20-an-hour paralegals into Clarence Darrows, and lay to rest the arguments of Talmudic scholars. In unfortunate reality, the driving force behind AI is its ability to put people out of work, particularly white-collar employees whose jobs have been untouched so far by robotics. Can Joe Six-pack Deliver? That raises the question of how lunatic-sector companies that have invested trillions of dollars in AI development, and who say they plan to invest much, much more, can ever hope to recoup their money, let alone multiply it voluminously as they seem to

Right on cue, Bloomberg.com splashed an article on its front page over the weekend explaining why the price of crude has been so subdued in the face of potentially severe supply disruptions in the Middle East. Turns out the world is awash in oil, the article explained — not just because of the success of U.S. fracking, but also because the Saudis have been pumping oil like crazy to stabilize their market share. The article was almost surely planted by Bloomberg’s masters in Washington to calm the herd. Energy markets are very heavily manipulated, and PR is frequently used to nudge quotes one way or the other, ostensibly “in the national interest.” Capping prices would appear to be a high priority at the moment, superseding the $100-a-barrel needs of traders and speculators who thrive on volatility. But who is kidding whom? Just beneath the veneer of eerie, artificial calm lurks enough pent-up panic to push quotes from a current $72 to $100 literally overnight. That’s why I’m sticking with a forecast from a week ago that August Crude will hit a minimum $86. In the meantime, don’t be lulled by the way bulls were rebuked this morning with a so-far $8 reversal from 78. Too many things could go wrong for oil prices to be this docile, and for stocks to be hovering so close to record highs. Only fools are buyers of shares at these levels. _______ ADDENDUM (1:25 p.m. EDT):  Sunday evening's fleeting spike, noted above, came within three cents (0.03) of the 78.37 rally target I had flagged in the earlier tout as a good bet. If you took that bet and then got short at the target with a stop-loss as tight as a nickel, you could have caught an up-and-down ride worth as much as

This symbol has tracked my forecast for the last couple of weeks, but what now? Up or down in the week ahead looks like a coin-toss at the moment, but if rates break lower, expect them to fall to at least 4.278% (p2, the secondary Hidden Pivot), and to take a tradable bounce from that number. Best case (for borrowers, that  is) would be for further slippage to d=4.161%, which presumably would be signaled by a decisive breach of p2=4.278%. Alternatively, if rates move higher, signaled by a two-day close above 4.439%, look for a move to 4.559%.

July Silver aborted a textbook 'mechanical' buy at 36.349 last week, a sign that there is something wrong below the surface despite the 12% rally in June from 33 to 37. Perhaps bulls just need a breather? SI is notorious for reversing after stopping out previous highs and lows. This is what it did on Friday, bouncing 50 cents after dipping a couple of ticks beneath the 35.580 low recorded on June 12. However, I doubt the reversal will get legs, since the move following the breach of a too-obvious support. We'll give it the benefit of the doubt nonetheless while stipulating that the uptrend must surpass three small peaks, the highest of them at 37.045, to regain our respect.

The 96.36 downside target we've been using remains viable. The current, countertrend move would need to surpass the 'external' peak at 100.54 recorded on May 29 to imply the long-term downtrend may be about to change. Even then, that would generate a 'mechanical' sell signal that we would likely ignore. More immediately, anything above 99.39 early in the week would be a faintly bullish sign.

Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble have nothing on the bunco game Wall Street has been running with Microsoft shares. I write on this subject often because the numbers are so huge, and because the game, which is intertwined with the biggest financial con-job in history, is not one you will ever read about in The Wall Street Journal or on Bloomberg.com. It thrives on the madness of crowds and grows bigger with every uptick in MSFT and the galaxy of stocks in its vortex. Microsoft's share price has gone from 393 to 483 since April, adding roughly $687 billion to the macro ledger. That is twice the size of California's budget for 2025. It would buy a Porsche 911 for every man, woman and child in New York and Chicago, or a super-deluxe Disney World vacation for every family in America. A clue to how the game works lies in the relentless smoothness of MSFT's ascent. You could comb through a thousand charts without finding one remotely like the one pictured above. You don't have to be a technical analyst to see that the long rally has been tightly controlled every step of the way.  This kind of price action is quite rare, but what makes it extraordinary is that it is not happening to just any stock, but rather to the most valuable stock in the world, a $3 trillion company with a lock on the operating systems of a billion-and-a-half desktop computers. The stock has been ratcheting higher on relatively thin volume and a dearth of bullish buying. Short-covering has done most of the lifting, with more urgency and power than merely optimistic investors could ever supply. Ka-Ching! MSFT's manipulators knew what they were doing when they goosed the stock into a sensational short squeeze on April