And welcome to Closing Bell. I'm Mike Santoli in for Scott Woffner today. This make or break hour begins with stocks hovering at their highs to close out a head spinning first half.

Got some gentle upside follow through to Friday's first new record high in the S&P 500 since February as investors take hard in the market's resilience, hints of trade deals, hopes of fed

rate cuts within a few months, and some seasonal tailwinds that tend to blow into July.

Here's your scorecard with 60 minutes left in regulation. S&P 500, you see up about a third

of 1%. It's kind of wobbled toward the flat line, but it stayed positive most of the day.

The Dow is outperforming by a bit, up four-tenths.

The NASDAQ, just slightly lower in terms of the one-day gain.

It takes us to our talk of the tape.

So have the bulls stolen back the benefit of the doubt for keeps, or is the case for caution rising along with stock prices?

Let's ask Chris Verone, market strategist at Stratigas. Chris, good to see you.

Great to be here, Mike. Thanks for coming by. Of course. What's the general playbook for when the

market retains a new high in your mind? Well, I think when you just look at the leadership

fabric of this market, and if all I told you was, hey, Mike, industrials are at new highs, financials are at new highs, tech is your leadership.

You'd be very hard-pressed to come up with a bearish call on the market or the economy here.

And that's the tale of the tape today.

And then conversely, all the defensives continue to weaken.

Staples, new relative lows, reits are not there, nothing from health care.

So if you just look at this purely from a leadership perspective, you wouldn't know anything happened in April. You wouldn't know anything happened last weekend. This is a very,

very strong leadership profile that continues to drive this market. So going back to, I guess,

sort of the initial weeks off the low, you know, the strength and the breadth of that move higher,

it did trigger some signals, right? And you were basically saying,

okay, you have to maybe start to allow for further upside from here. Are we looking for anything

...