Last week, one earnings report stopped the market in its tracks.
Dell Technologies posted its best single day in company history — up nearly 33% on Friday, May 29 and it continued on Monday June 1, up another 10.7%.
Quarterly revenue soared nearly 88% year over year. AI server revenue alone jumped 757% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion. The stock is now up over 200% in 2026.
Wall Street was caught flat-footed. Again.
So where does this fit in the bigger picture?
Data thru June 1
The Elliott Wave Context
In my April post I described a potential Wile E. Coyote moment — a market running on momentum ahead of economic reality. At the time, the S&P 500 was about 10% off its low, and I was watching for a rally that could extend into late April or early May.
That rally didn't just extend — it kept going.
The S&P 500 just posted its ninth consecutive weekly gain, closing May at record highs above 7,580. The Dow crossed 51,000 for the first time ever. These aren't the numbers of a bear market bounce.
From an Elliott Wave perspective, this has the look and feel of a Wave 3 — usually the most powerful and extended move in a 5-wave impulse. Wave 3s are characterized by accelerating momentum, and fundamental news that confirms what the chart was already showing. Dell's earnings report is exactly that kind of confirmation.
What's especially notable is the breadth of the move. It's no longer just Nvidia. Micron, Qualcomm, ServiceNow, Datadog, HP — the whole AI ecosystem caught a bid last week. Broadening participation is a Wave 3 signature.
The Decade Cycle Alignment
This also fits neatly with the Decade Cycle work I've done.
We are in Year 6 of the 2021–2030 decade. Historically, nine of the last ten decades saw their high occur in Years 6–10. The middle years — 4 through 6 — were positive in all ten decades studied. We are right on schedule.
The Roaring Twenties analog I wrote about last year is also worth revisiting here. In the 1920s, the big mid-decade thrust came in 1925 — Year 5 of that cycle — and launched the market into its famous blowoff into 1929. We could be entering a similar acceleration phase right now, with AI playing the role electricity and the automobile played a century ago.
The Dell quarter isn't an anomaly. It's a data point that says the infrastructure buildout is real, it's large, and it's accelerating.
What to Watch
That said, I'm not abandoning caution.
Nine straight up weeks creates conditions for a pause or short-term pullback — even in the strongest Wave 3 advances. Wave 3 doesn't go straight up forever. There will be corrections along the way, and they can feel alarming even when the larger trend is intact.
Key levels I'm watching on the S&P 500:
- 7,517 — May 14 high
- 7,338 — first key support level, break of this level means first meaningful correction underway.
Consumer sentiment also remains a wildcard. The University of Michigan's May reading was revised down to 44.8 — lowest reading ever recorded, that doesn't match the market's exuberance. That divergence is something to monitor. Supply shocks from tariffs and the Middle East haven't fully fed through to prices yet. The Wile E. Coyote risk hasn't disappeared — it's just been deferred.
Bottom line:
Dell's quarter looks like Wave 3 fuel — the kind of fundamental confirmation that shows up when a major advance is underway, not when it's ending.
The Decade Cycle, the Elliott Wave structure, and now the earnings data are all pointing in the same direction.
The high for this decade is still ahead of us.
But so is the volatility.
