Microsoft (MSFT) Stock: Price, Trend, Options & Financials
Microsoft's price regime, relative strength, unusual-options history, curated-manager ownership and filed fundamentals — joined into one dated stock intelligence page.
What the evidence says now
MSFT closed at $483.24 on Aug 21, 2026. The price is +15.1% from its 50-day average and +12.0% from its 200-day average, which places it in the rules-based “recovery above trend” regime. The relative-strength check: over three months the stock returned +15.3%, beating SPY by 12.2%. It remains 12.7% below its 52-week high.
Sources, methodology & freshnessLast updated 2026-08-21 · Open ↓Close ↑
The close is +15.1% from its 50-day average and +12.0% from its 200-day average. Over three months, MSFT returned +15.3% versus +3.1% for SPY.
- vs 50-day
- +15.1%
- vs 200-day
- +12.0%
- From 52W high
- -12.7%
Descriptive, not predictive. “Uptrend” is a rules-based reading of the close and moving averages; it is not a rating, price target or recommendation.
Price & regime
One year of daily price and volume
252 split-adjusted sessions · candles above, share volume below
Unusual options — attention, not intent
MSFT appeared in a UOA top-30 list on 36 of 62 archived scanner sessions: 24 call-side, 12 put-side and 0 on both lists. The latest session did not place it in either top 30. Its larger composite score was -0.06, below the 1.5 “strong” threshold. That is repeated options attention, not proof of bullish trade initiation.
| Recent flag | Call rank | Put rank |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-17 | #1 | — |
| 2026-08-12 | #4 | — |
| 2026-08-11 | #4 | — |
| 2026-08-07 | #6 | — |
| 2026-08-06 | — | #11 |
| 2026-08-05 | #28 | — |
| 2026-08-04 | #15 | — |
| 2026-07-31 | — | #9 |
| 2026-07-30 | — | #10 |
| 2026-07-23 | #9 | — |
Latest chain snapshot
2026-08-21Strong-signature cutoff: 1.5. Current OTM volume/OI: 0.034 calls, 0.041 puts.
Researched catalyst context
2026-08-17Aug 17: Microsoft fell 3.0% ($495.40 to $480.35) after a Morgan Stanley note warned that hyperscaler capital spending is set to grow about 57% in 2026 versus 2025 and that the gap between capital deployment and revenue generation continues to pressure near-term cash generation, citing roughly $190 billion of AI infrastructure spending against about $67 billion of expected free cash flow this year at Microsoft. The out-of-the-money call demand arrived on a down day, so it reads as dip-buying and upside positioning into the sell-off rather than a bullish news catalyst.
Microsoft is the largest enterprise software and cloud company; the late-July quarter put Azure above $100 billion of annual revenue and Microsoft 365 Copilot at 30 million paid seats, which is why the capex debate matters. The honest frame is that today's dated driver was negative (an analyst cash-flow warning) and the call buying is a bet the drawdown is temporary. Watch whether the stock holds the post-earnings range, follow-on notes on hyperscaler capex and debt issuance, and the next capex commentary from Microsoft itself.
Source: The Motley Fool: Why Microsoft Stock Dropped Today (Aug 17, 2026) ↗Curated-manager ownership
4 of the 20 managers in the project's curated 13F set reported a long Microsoft position in their latest filing, worth $3.2B in aggregate at each filing's reported value. This is a focused manager panel, not the complete institutional holder list.
| Fund / manager | Position value | Portfolio | Shares | Quarter change | Report date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pershing Square Capital Bill Ackman · MSFT | $2.1B | 15.26% | 5.65M | — new | 2026-03-31 |
Altimeter Capital Brad Gerstner · MSFT | $473M | 4.81% | 1.27M | +7.1% increased | 2026-06-30 |
Fundsmith Terry Smith · MSFT | $596M | 4.36% | 1.60M | -23.2% reduced | 2026-06-30 |
Baron Capital Group Ron Baron · MSFT | $24M | 0.04% | 63,695 | -13.6% reduced | 2026-06-30 |
Filed fundamentals — latest snapshot
Go deeper into the filings
The dedicated Financials dashboard carries the complete quarterly and annual income statement, balance sheet and cash-flow history, with derived figures flagged and every XBRL concept disclosed.
Open MSFT Financials →How MSFT trades — the working manual
Microsoft spans cloud infrastructure, productivity software, operating systems, security and gaming. For the stock, the central tension is whether demand for cloud and AI services can grow fast enough to earn an attractive return on a much larger infrastructure base while protecting the margins of the established software franchises.
What can move the tape
- 01Azure and other cloud growth, including the pace at which AI workloads become recurring consumption.
- 02Microsoft 365 pricing, seat growth and enterprise renewal behavior.
- 03Data-center capital spending, depreciation and the effect of infrastructure investment on margins.
- 04Enterprise technology budgets, commercial bookings and remaining performance obligations.
What can fool the read
- 01AI infrastructure can create a long delay between cash outlays and measurable returns.
- 02Cloud and application competition can pressure pricing or require sustained investment.
- 03Antitrust, bundling and platform regulation can constrain distribution advantages.
- 04A premium valuation can make solid operating results insufficient when expectations are higher.
Microsoft triggered 3 issuer-level flags in the committed 2026-04-01–2026-08-21 archive. The latest was MSFT on 2026-07-30: 2.7× its 30-day average volume while the stock moved +3.0% that session.
Not published yet. The local archive has 1 reported MSFT events—too few for a defensible gap-and-drift study. This missing block is an explicit indexing blocker.
Source map & freshness
| Block | What it uses | Vintage | Raw data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | SEC issuer + primary security mapping | 2026-08-23 | JSON ↓ |
| Price & trend | Split-adjusted daily OHLCV + SPY comparison | 2026-08-21 | CSV ↓ |
| Options | End-of-day chain anomaly ranks | 2026-08-21 | Premium → |
| Ownership | Latest filings from 20 curated 13F managers | 2026-08-21 | Tool → |
| Financials | SEC EDGAR XBRL company facts | 2026-08-15 | JSON ↓ |
| Joined profile | The exact contract rendered by this page | 2026-08-23 | JSON ↓ |
MSFT stock questions
Is MSFT stock in an uptrend?+
MSFT is classified in the “recovery above trend” regime as of 2026-08-21: the close is +15.1% from its 50-day average and +12.0% from its 200-day average. This describes the current tape. It is not a forecast.
What does unusual options activity in MSFT mean?+
Microsoft's OTM option chain produced an outlier relative to the scanner universe on at least one archived session. Call-side and put-side labels identify which book produced the signature; end-of-day chain data does not identify buyers, sellers, institutions or spread legs.
Are the MSFT 13F holdings current?+
No. 13F filings are delayed quarter-end snapshots and cover only the curated managers in this project. They are useful for documented ownership changes, not real-time positioning or complete institutional ownership.
Where are MSFT's income statement and cash flow?+
The dedicated MSFT Financials page contains the full quarterly and annual income statement, balance sheet and cash-flow history parsed from SEC EDGAR XBRL. This stock page carries only the latest filed snapshot.
Why is there no MSFT earnings-move base rate yet?+
The committed earnings archive does not yet contain enough reported events for a defensible company-level reaction study. The page leaves that block unpublished instead of presenting a tiny sample as a reliable base rate.