This post is purely speculative.

1 Short-term trend: Institutions are deliberately setting traps for retail investors.

1) The end-of-month portfolio rebalancing that started around the Dragon Boat Festival didn't wait until the end of the month; right after the festival, they started pumping and then dumping, catching everyone off guard.

2) On Monday and Tuesday this week, the last two days of the month, everyone expected a drop, but it didn't happen. Instead, they started pushing the market up, causing many to clear their positions early. Seeing the rally, they were forced to chase the rally on Tuesday, for example, chasing storage stocks.

3) On Wednesday, they used the META news to suddenly crash the market, trapping those who chased storage stocks, forcing them to cut losses. At the same time, they pumped stocks like META, MSFT, TSLA, PLTR that had been suppressed for over a month (the big players had already built their positions), forcing people to chase rallies later.

4) What about today? The last trading day before Independence Day.

2 On the news front, Micron donated money to Donald Trump, letting him talk it up to see how the stock price reacts.

3 The bad part is: capital hasn't left the US stock market; it has just rotated to other sectors. Even with hardware getting hammered, the broader market hasn't fallen much. This means the big money is now taking profits at highs. Many stocks have experienced non-fundamental stampedes. Combined with points 1)-4) above, this is essentially a trap for short-term retail traders. Because short-term traders are definitely losing money. As long as you play the short-term game, the big players have plenty of tricks, determined by psychology and algorithms.

4 My strategy is not to rush into bottom-fishing. I'm spacing out my bottom-fishing buys. The downside is that the first and second batches of capital deployed are easily trapped, but the upside is they won't be trapped too deep, though I might miss out on some sudden rallies and earn less later.

However, because I positioned at lows in giants, including Tesla, Microsoft, Google, which have risen quite a bit recently, it's still okay.

Observing, especially the SOXX trend to judge capital flows. Hardware has risen so much; if it crashes in July/August, I worry many won't be pessimistic enough or cut losses, and it won't stop.