# Market Unwind: Crowding, AI CapEx, and Credit Stress

**Podcast:** Odd Lots
**Published:** 2026-02-06

## Transcript

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I think there's a chance you might have to re-record an intro.
Or at least the intro might be out of date by the time the episode comes out.
That's how you know.
That's how you know it's bad.
That and when people start waving around standard deviations.
Standard deviation.
And also when people start saying it's a healthy correction in the market.
Although I haven't seen that much of it.
It's pretty gnarly.
Also, when we don't just say the date that we're recording, but we say the minute we're recording this at 7 04 AM on February 6th, 2026.
All the signs are back.
Joe, I want a t-shirt that says Ruthless Utility Maximizer.
Black gold.
Let's talk about losers.
Who cares?
I've decided I'm gonna base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US.
Skulls Unlimited.
Ooh, what's the ticker for that?
No, I think that, like in a couple years, the AI will do a really good job of making the OutLodge podcast.
How do I get more popular and successful?
One day that person will have the mandate of heaven.
We do have the poof.
Welcome to Lots More, where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now.
Because even when Odlots is over, there's always lots more.
And we really do have a perfect guest.
But it is weird, isn't it?
Because it's you know, it's a little different.
It's been a very strange.
It's a surreal, it's a surreal type of market environment, especially over the last week.
Right.
So if you've been living under a rock, markets have been tanking, and there have been a bunch of different things going on.
But first of all, gold and silver and the metals complex started plunging, and then you had like basically a slaughter in software stocks.
What else?
There is one.
Oh, and crypto crypto.
Yeah, crypto's a big one, so Bitcoin has like down to 66,000, something like that.
I think it hit 60,000.
Oh wow.
And that's the thing.
I can't keep up anymore.
And also there's concern about private credit because private credit has so much exposure to software, and they basically lent all the money at the top of the valuation cycle, which I wrote about in the newsletter yesterday.
But anyway, there's a lot to talk about in markets.
Who do we call when markets are moving?
That's right.
What's up, Charlie?
You guys are amazing.
So this is Charlie McGallagut, of course.
He is the cross asset macro strategist over at Namora.
I'm gonna start with the the simple question.
Maybe it's not an easy question, but what was the proximate catalyst for all of this?
Because you have a bunch of different things going on, including, by the way, the nomination of Warsh at the Fed.
So absolutely part of the feedback loop.
And but these things are never singular input, you know, in a world of thousands of macro factor variables.
In this case, and you know I'm an ambulance chaser, that's kind of what my gig is a grave robber, a carpet bagger, you know, all those things.
I try to reverse engineer car accidents.
Yeah.
And kind of the qualitative starting point of that is to locate consensus positions that tend to then crowd in positioning.
When trend trades develop, that's usually accompanied or requirement, a requirement being low volatility to accumulate those kind of smooth trends.
So point being, I think there were a number of market narratives that got a little lazy.
You know, for instance, Q4 of last year, as we recall, I think there was, you know, somewhere three to four months ago, there was still a fair bit of concern with regards to this idea of like labor cracking, you know, and there was still a lot of feedback with regards to Liberation Day and the policy volatility dynamics.
You know, before things really got hot with policy volatility most recently, but um, and that was leading to some, you know, some skepticism and as it relates to kind of the equities world.
What did you do?
You just stuck in the stuff that kept working.
And that was that same dynamic we spoke about a number of times last year, you know, that crowding into secular growth, mega cap tech, AI, they just keep growing earnings, profitability, all of those metrics, and they took up this massive part of the market.
That's part of this positioning that said, you know, at some point in Q4 run hot starts happening.
You start seeing data upside surprising again, right?
He starts openly and more recently transitioning into January, talking and openly advocating his weak dollar policy.
Europe is playing along.
You know, so you you you start having these things where people were really accumulating around effectively a lot of short dollar trades.
And when I'm sitting there and I'm seeing like how do these narratives go wrong, how does this crowding go wrong?
And I'm seeing, you know, gold and silver being attributed to this debasement narrative or this de dollarization narrative.
There's credibility in those arguments, but I'm also a skeptic with regards to the flows and the actual like singular catalyst of those, but I start seeing those positionings really overshoot.
We're not talking like linear projections, like bending off the curve type of you know, price performance of late.
I see EM equities crowding.
I see cyclical equities because everybody owned secular growth and nobody had enough economic sensitivity.
So I start seeing these kind of positioning overshoots.
You know, that's all the work that we do internally.
And it just said if the dollar starts agitating and it stops going lower and you start losing these short-term trend windows, and then you get, you know, maybe a little bit of wow, we didn't get the max dovish has it trade, right?
Oh, we start seeing upside surprise data when everybody is short dollar and thinking rest of world growth and actually US is maybe leading to the upside again and re-accelerating.
Dollar starts performing, people start monetizing and you start taking money out of these trades, and that turns into a bigger de-risking.
Obviously, we want to get into like got to get into everything, including like the software sell-off and its connection to silver, etc.
You know, it occurs to me, speaking of the software thing, and I'm glad you brought up liberation day.
One of the memes of 2025 was just this idea that, well, look, we don't really know what tariffs are going to do.
We're not really sure what effect they're going to have on the economy.
But one thing we could be pretty sure of is that it's only going to affect the sort of physical goods economy and not the digital economy.
Yeah.
And so tariffs in a way sort of seem to embolden the software, maybe crypto digital trade, because it's like this stuff is borderless.
It doesn't, it's not going to get held up in customs.
So let's lean into this.
And then so it's interesting to hear, you know, then you get this big reversal.
Can we measure it when you talk about like how leveraged and how consensus these trades were, whether we're talking about software or whatever, could we measure how crowded those trades were, how levered these trades were?
Absolutely.
I mean, I'll I'll look across, you know, we we we have internal money that we run within QIS businesses where there's billions of dollars behind, you know, very sophisticated, not like naive toy models from trend to risk parity, you know, vault control, target volatility.
So I look at where those gross exposures are and like period point blank, grosses were too big, right?
If you look at a snapshot of uh uh a model risk parity portfolio, four assets long only using leverage to allocate your volatility, right?
Long only in equities, bonds, credit, commodities, different weightings based on different economic scenarios, like very kind of generic uh risk parity.
We're seeing on a let's say a five-year look back, 99 spot seven percentile gross exposure.
It just so happens, right?
You know, Goldman Sachs prime brokerage data with regards to equity hedge fund grosses as of last Friday, 100 percentile on a five-year look back.
So, like these are these are synonymous.
Now, now, gross exposure is not purely a function of trailing realized volatility, right?
Different strategies deploy a different leverage, different strategies, you know, will could try to amplify a market neutral versus a net lien or a directional lien.
But by and large, the grosses were too damn big.
It's like the guy that used to run for mayor.
And when you see grosses being that big, and you see prices bending off the curve, and you see the thesis behind it, and this is where I'm pumped to tie in like the Bitcoin read, right?
Yeah.
If debasement was actually what people are saying it was, right?
This idea that in de-dollarization, you know, moving away from fiat, you know, US policy volatility, US fiscal deficit, which by the way, okay, like same with Europe, same with Japan now, you know, with their little trust moment, you know, Europe has taken the austerity break off.
That's a global phenomenon with fiat currency.
So, like, okay, I can get with that to a certain extent.
But like, why didn't Bitcoin participate?
If that's what people kind of claim is, you know, Bitcoin's a shapeshifter, as is gold.
But, you know, my story and my skepticism with regards to that debasement or that de dollarization was the way that Bitcoin absolutely did not participate when it was gold and silver.
And I look, you know, I sit in options business.
I see just outrageous call skews and demand for upside and people, you know, keep putting on, keep reloading into these, you know, the call spreads and upside trades in SLV and GLD, the options volumes are massive.
It became a speculative, macro-tourist retail type of a trade on top of all this.
But Bitcoin kept going lower.
And I started seeing one, if people are grabbing, people clearly have this preference for real assets, you know, physical assets right now in this world of debasement, of fiat, of fiscal deficit spend, perpetual issuance, all those things.
Bitcoin is trading like software, it's trading like SaaS, which is going through an existential crisis right now for really justified reasons, especially with regards to valuation, right?
And the funny thing is when we were talking about, you know, how AI was actually gonna, I was making the point kind of Q4, start of Q4 last year.
There's two major tailwinds for equities that become potential headwinds in 2026.
They're very well socialized, but they still ring true.
Ironically, we kind of got a back door on it.
One was that the CapEx spending with regard to AI, you know, was burning your cash.
And you're moving through the cash so fast, you're right.
And the cash that made these companies so preferred, so you know, screening is quality and profitability and all these great things.
They're liquid, they're big, you can move in and out of them.
They only go higher, you know.
And they did a bunch of buybacks.
Well, that's the trick, right?
So, like you aggregate kind of like the mag 7 or like you know, maybe the 12 biggest kind of like AI contingent types of players, you're talking like 20 to 30 percent of the overall SP 500 buyback.
So that's a huge point for me because I've made this before.
Buybacks are like seven to eight X the largest source of demand for equities over the past 15 years.
Wow.
And it's a volse oppressor.
Yep, right.
I mean, you are up there.
You're a passive bid under the market on a view up order, or more importantly, when there is a drawdown, that's when they get most active.
So it's like long gamma, it's like synthetic long gamma in the market.
So, one, you're burning through your cash and you're no longer doing that.
Two, you're burning through your cash and you're no longer buying back stock as this vol shock absorber and passive bid into the market from kind of sort of a quarter to a third of the overall SP's buyback.
That you're then two having to take on this new debt, you take on new loans, you know, to a certain extent you're trying to lever the balance sheet, but you know, more importantly, what does that mean for credit?
Credit has been this perpetual kind of vault bleed.
Yeah, because spreads are so tight.
Credit is people have been issuing to fund buybacks as well.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, ironically, it's a probably a separate podcast, but remember we used to kick and scream like, oh, QE, this is crazy, like this malinvestment, like they're bringing debt for buybacks and they're not doing you know, three RD and they're not spending CapEx and not building plans.
Well, here you go.
You know, Druck said something like this, you know, many years ago in an interview.
He's like, actually, when you start to see, you know, the cash turn into CapEx spend, there's usually kind of a point of agitation, and it's not always in the right direction for equities, let's say, right?
And in this case, I think we're starting, obviously, you're starting to get that, but the credit point is critical because the pace of the CapEx kind of prisoner dilemma that we're still seeing right now with like yesterday's earnings releases, the magnitude of that supply in the investment grade market is simply going to widen spreads.
Tech is a big part of that.
Now, this is the punchline.
Bringing it back to software, bringing it back to Bitcoin.
As we were all kind of watching this potential for you know, the credit markets to become a headwind, not in a shock, not in a freeze, you know, not anything close to a systemic dynamic, just too much supply with spreads too tight.
You're not being compensated for it.
So, like there was kind of this general short in credit because guess what?
The whole world is watching one in like baby footsteps.
Can Oracle get their funding done?
That was the one day we had a sigh of relief this week, by the way.
They got 25 billion of investment grade done plus converts with like 129 billion of demand.
The market huge exhale.
But guess what?
OpenAI is still in the background somewhere.
We're like kind of sort of in the next two months, they got to come up with like anywhere from 100 to 200 billion bucks.
And that is still a major point of skepticism.
It's not a funny punchline, is it?
No, it's not, it doesn't make you feel really good.
But here's the thing as anthropic has done their thing, and I mean, bang, you guys are in in it right now with regards to Claude and the implications of vibe coding and you know, a whole reset with regards to certain industries and taking out, even if it's just the basic level of like legal compliance documentation, and we've seen it start to hit bottom lines with regards to earnings mentions and things like that.
That is happening so fast that software is going through this existential crisis.
And here's the deal: those dudes are stuffed on restricted shares.
They're stuffed on RSUs.
And the concentric circles of VC boys and tech boys and SAS Bros and Bitcoin bros has a lot of overlap.
It's all the beats.
Boys and bros.
It's not a Venn diagram, it's just a circle.
It's kind of like straight up overlap.
And, you know, in this sense, you can't sell, you're kind of being haircut 10%, it feels like every week right now.
Yeah.
With regards to do I have a job?
What are the prospects?
Where is this industry going?
And what do you have to sell?
You know, and I think that that's why it is trading tick for tick, year to date with SaaS software.
And it's quite remarkable.
And that to me, as I step back to this large conversation, it's not really about debasement.
Right?
This is a digital phenomenon.
This is a liquidity crunch with regards to this, the idiosyncratics of that sector really coming under attack.
And by the way, now it's also become a backdoor credit story where it's not simply the spread widening from the hyperscalers, it's people worrying now about private credit, actually.
The BDC guys, which are, you know, sitting on a lot of this stuff with, you know, really tricky valuations and not a lot of like buffer room on, you know, with regards to covenants and things like that.
So, you know, it's become a huge macro story.
They kind of did the end around with regards to where we thought it was going to come, but we can handle a couple things at once.
You know, you all of a sudden you get a little bit of a surprise with regards to the Fed share, dollar stabilizes.
We are you already had people in all these short dollar trades.
People start taking money out of, you know, gold upside, silver upside.
They start taking off some EM upside.
And at that point, like last Thursday, I'm looking at grosses, I'm looking at our CTA trend net exposures and commodities and metals, 98 percentile.
I'm looking at our net short dollar exposure, zero percentile, looking at our net equities exposure, 97 percentile.
I'm saying these are the qualitative things I need to see where profit taking and monetization turns into a risk management exercise.
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Hey there, all bots listeners.
As we come into 2026, we are realizing that one thing we're constantly thinking about on the show is how companies actually get built.
Not just like the headline version of that story, but the messy operational reality of it.
Right.
We love messy operational reality of things.
The never-ending question, dive deeper, how companies make it big, what causes one company to succeed, why others fail.
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Yeah.
And we actually we had them on OddLods back in February last year.
We talked to them about everything from TSMC, NVIDIA, Mars, Hermes, scale, capital structure, the importance of incentives, all of the different, I guess, ingredients that go into some of the success of these names that we talk about every day.
Also, their show actually turned 10 years old in 2025, just like us.
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Big year.
Anyway, if you like Oddlots, the way we get into various market dynamics, how the economy actually works under the hood, you'll obviously appreciate and enjoy the acquired podcast.
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So speaking of selling what you can and not necessarily what you want, one of the reasons that yesterday, February 5th, I guess, was so painful is because we started to see the places, the few places where people were able to hide start to go down.
So consumer staples, for instance, it wasn't a big drop, but still they'd been surging earlier in the year as people sort of switched out of software and into consumer goods.
But now it's not quite clear where they're gonna go.
So correlation seems to be picking up, right?
Like in a market crash, correlation goes to one.
But at the same time, I can't figure out what's going on with implied correlation.
Because if I look that up, it's still pretty low.
So this is, you know, absolutely topical, and it's something that you know we continue to get questions on over the last few years, you know, that generic, like why is vol so low, right?
You know, and low vol or high vol is incredibly subjective.
It's about the you know, the vol service, it's about SKU, it's about where the starting point was, where you've moved from, how quickly all, you know, it's it's art plus science.
The part of the problem with vol in general certainly being sticky, and I think it comes down to where the money has flowed with regards to the hedge fund space, is that you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, the long short universe, you know, running net exposure, was I don't want to say, you know, necessarily dollar for dollar, like axed or necessarily larger than you know, the multi-strats at the time, but like they ran net and they would lever up positions or they would hedge their longs and there were, you know, generally speaking, there was buyers' volatility with those guys to a certain extent.
You know, if you look back kind of on the sort of let's say five at 10 years of dollar flows into the hedge fund space with regards to all new flows, multi-strats are conservatively 80 cents of every dollar in.
And then if you actually include outflows from other strategies you're legitimately through one dollar of so the point I'm making here and and multi-strats are unbelievable with regards to their low volatility with regards to the consistency of the returns with regards to the the disciplined risk management the tight stops model yeah the non-correlated returns which is the whole story why people keep al allocating into them they've proven to be such an absolutely undeniable force hence all this dollar flow but think about it like this we don't see the core ones anymore and this is like core ones core ones meaning like when things shock everything up together or down together right and that was kind of the old state of the world but now what we tend to see and this is exactly what we saw earlier this week when you had you know and of course financial market returns are not on a normal distribution but for you know I hate people that point that out it's like it's like like something at a pharmaceutical advantage.
Yeah, like you have to include it because otherwise someone annoying.
Don't take this drug if you're allergic to this drug.
Yeah.
So the point here being that, you know, you would see kind of like a risk-on, risk-off type of core one phenomenon, you know, in past era.
Part of what is happening now in my mind, you know, with these, you know, little bit of fragmented, you know, bullet points, you know, triangulating here is the fact that the dollars and the leverage controlled by the market neutral multi-strat equity space are so overwhelming in the sense that when you get when you are forced to de-risk or degross, you know, the tilts go wrong, that you have the offsetting short on the other end, right?
It's not just you stop out of your net longs or your crowded longs, right?
It's that you're also, you know, theoretically an equal dollar amount on the short side being covered.
And what ends up happening on like the two big down days this week, it was like 250 stocks were up, 250 stocks were down.
Yeah.
So you're getting this like reverse dispersion.
Yeah.
Right.
Very much the opposite of what last year was, which is this crazy concentration of like top decile, bottom decile, just spread 99%ile, like a 10-year basis.
Which feeds into why people are loaded into momentum, right?
The higher stuff keeps going higher.
It's human nature.
This is like FAM and French.
This is factor alpha, you know, commoditize alpha.
So these things, I think, due to this kind of where the dollar flows have been, the market neutrality, the fact that there's always this offset against it, you're not getting core shocks.
And when you don't get core shocks necessarily, at least initially, because Vol did not really react until just like two days ago.
And yesterday, Volleval got a little tricky too.
But you know, point being you need correlation as an input to higher vol to like sustain.
And you're just not getting that.
You still have low core.
Now, the trick is to your point, Drace, it's very interesting.
You mentioned the defensives, right?
The reversal that we saw when people said, Look, I'm I'm too much exposure in secular growth, mega cap tech, AI, which gives you a lot of momentum exposure, a lot of, you know, you know, unintended kind of exposures that when people said I need more economic sensitivity, I'm taking up my cyclicality, right?
The three best performing sectors kind of year to date for most of the year have been like energy, materials, industrials, right?
Right.
Stuff that people have kind of been underrated for the longest time in the absence of a hot economic cycle, you know.
But also, too, when you started seeing defensives joining that rotation, like it was this massive value overgrowth trade.
And that's the three, four, five Z-score types of moves that you're talking about, where people didn't have that stuff on, and your longs go against you and your shorts go against you.
And and that is also amplifying, you know, these kind of moves.
Because look, it's not just the market neutrals, like they're not boogeyman here, they're unbelievable.
They barely lose money ever on a monthly basis.
They just have very disciplined tight stops to to get out of these liens and tilts hard and fast, unemotionally.
And but guess what?
It's you know, retail, it's all the story stocks, it's all these themes.
That's why I pointed out for the last two years of the boom in leverage DTFs, like 82% of the assets in leverage DTFs, which act like synthetic negative gamma, right?
The higher you go, the more you have to buy at the end of the day, the lower you go, the more you have to sell.
You know, massive pool of AUM now, because of like retail, you know, tilted speculative leverage behavior, are tied into that concentric circle of AI, mega cap tech, semis, you know, disruptor crypto.
So we're super overweighted, super overindexed to that stuff, which amplifies when you have the tight market neutral stopouts, you know, with all that leverage with all that AUM, you know, to get their factors right.
Because at the end of the day, those guys are not trying to make factor bets.
There's scenarios where you maybe run even the little net if there's like a big, you know, economic reacceleration trade or something like that.
But generally speaking, the idea is like we don't want beta to the SP.
That's the point.
That's why people pay us.
Stop comparing us to SP returns.
So all these things are part of this like backdrop, plus the narrative overshoots to me.
That was fantastic.
And it's very intuitive.
I mean, there's already good theoretical ideas for thinking that the multi-streats were huge drivers of all this.
And then when you add in the fact that the staples, like the sort of underloved areas or energy materials or the winners, very intuitive to your point.
Unsoftware, you know, no one really knows.
Obviously, the degree to which AI is gonna obliterate these businesses, obvious these businesses.
No one really knows.
But like from the perspective, you mentioned the tight stops that each manager has within these firms.
Can you give us like some sense of how much is it like, look, I just want to keep my job here, and this is the ugly stuff that's going on.
And so I'm just gonna sell now and ask questions later.
Like, how much does that play into on a week like this?
Well, we're we're talking about wide swaths of strategies and active, you know, systematic versus you know, field directional trading, and you know, you know, tight stops are you know typically that you know down 2%, kind of down one and a half percent, maybe even in some cases, but you know, that's why it is managed so microscopically, and you're extracting these you know, basis points of alpha in your longs and shorts, and then you know, using leverage, like a you know, a market neutral is probably 200, 300% gross by and large, like long short was always kind of like 50 net, 150 gross, something to the to that extent, but they're just not as big of a player anymore.
But you know, that's the trick here.
Like when I start seeing it, I always love the systematic stuff because it's so tight in, it kind of looks a lot like the options market.
And market structure by and large feeds momentum now, right?
You're not scaling out of positions the more they trend, you're loading into them.
So, like whether it's target volatility or CTA or you assign uh uh an exposure target, you know, a leverage target.
And if the volatility is five and your vault target is 10, you gotta lever that two times or 12, you know, like, and that is ironically, the lower vol goes, the more you need to add leverage onto that position, right?
To match your target.
And that's why that's the problem.
We create crashes because all of modern anybody who's like on a VAR model is actually a momentum trader, right?
You have to d-leverage when vol goes higher by and large.
Now, of course, if you have a high conviction bet and vol goes higher, that's actually going to be part of your potential return profile.
You know, that's great.
And God knows people have learned to like, you know, sell rich vol and buy, you know, buy dips.
It's become conditioned.
These time horizons are like hours at this point.
But like some people have made an entire career out of doing it once.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I mean, you gotta have a titanium stomach.
Like, I've been talking to a buddy all week at a multi, you know, this absolute madman, and there's many others like him.
You know, he's been shorting silver the last two weeks.
I'm like, how you been sleeping, dude?
You know, it's like a little better now, but you know, there's the silver moves are an unbelievable.
Yesterday it was like 16.
I mean, these I've seen people I've spoken to say that the silver move specifically may have been the crazy one of the craziest moves they've seen.
You know, entire career.
It's crowding plus the trend plus the optionality plus the leverage DTF, you know, the the optionality is leverage in and of itself, and it's high beta, you know, as is to regular, you know, big brother gold.
So these moves are, you know, wild, but we know that in the era of this speculative era, you know, people seek the movement.
That's the opportunity.
You are not going to retire four percent in cash.
You know, that's just the way this world works right now.
Now, you know, you do you necessarily need to be like shorting vol or things like that?
That's not the way to do this, but people YOLO, it's that financial nihilism that we've spoken about, you know, many, many times.
You seek out the movement.
You want the stuff that's moving.
And generally speaking, and this is where it's so interesting, like you try to press moves by and large, certainly like the retail cohort.
The world is not built the vast majority of the time for mean reversion anymore.
Value is mean reversion.
Like something is rich, something is cheap.
It's this counter kind of like a gamma type of a flow, you know, long gamma type flow.
We feed moves now because of the risk management dynamics, and especially too, just like market structure, how much trend there is built into the market, leverage ETFs, options, things like that, you know, particularly the way that people tend to use them, which is kind of to feed into prevailing moves.
So all of this kind of changes the behavior and the expected outcomes, where you know, momentum has been, you know, this remarkable factor for you know academic history studying these things because of like greed and fear and things like that.
And moves can extend longer than you think.
Just because a trade is crowded doesn't mean it's the wrong trade.
But when you start to layer in, as I said, the positioning data, the overall leverage data, the kind of the conversational qualitative how many people are buying into this, but then you see, you know, some like divots here and there, and like the stories.
That doesn't actually make sense.
And actually, this thing is starting to stall.
And now I got people taking money out of this thing, and I got trend disloaded into it.
This is gonna unwind hard.
And I sent that note Thursday, you know, started unwinding hard.
Friday, doors got blown off.
And guess what?
It waterfalls.
So other crowded trades go cospie.
Everybody was like, you know, no brainer into that.
Japanese bank longs, right?
Which are a short JGB proxy, macro tourism.
Like people start coming out of these trades because they're non-core, but they were high sharp.
Right.
So flows before pros, but now the pros are chasing flows, and that's hurting the bros.
That was good.
That's okay.
That's incredible.
Thanks.
Um, okay.
So you just touched on this, but what stops the bleed?
I think you're, you know, you're getting certainly some relief here.
I mean, look, people will say, you know, at some point on a smaller gross, you don't really have to do anymore.
You don't have to reach for hedges, which get dealer short gamma, right?
Because you're you don't, you know, have as much exposure anymore.
That's the first step.
People then have to monetize their hedges.
So all of these reversals happen.
You take off your hedges, or you take off your directional stuff, whether you're shorting futures against the moves, or you're buying downside puts, you're buying VIX calls.
You start to unwind that, and guess what?
Like now the dealers got to take off their stuff, and you got delta to buy.
And then some people say, Oh, everybody's taking their hedges off around the street, markets starting to rally off these lows.
I'm gonna buy some zero DTE calls, and you know, then we create more delta to buy.
We're back to the races, and and and volts, you know, Vol starts rolling over, and guess what?
Then the systematic, the vol supply people come out of the woodwork and they feel comfortable to come back and lean into this, and that's de facto by the dip, right?
So this is the cycle in the world that we live in.
There's too many assets.
This is a final point that that may be tangential here, but with regards to how these dynamics end, it's not necessarily about like back in the days, like Warren Buffett steps in, you know, provides some you know financing line, or you know, Toma Bravo stepping in doing some like deal.
Satoshi Nakamoto is calling up uh Warren Buffett.
Yeah, I don't know if that's offering 10% of uh it's more about you know these flows kind of stopping the bleeding.
But you know, this is the other thing, too.
Like the vol flows are so important with regards to the like the hedge unwinds and creating the turn in the market, the inflection, especially with the conditioning, buy the dip, sell the vol rip.
That like fixed income has been trash for five years since the tightening cycle, since you know, poor inflation still running too hot, right?
So people said, Look, this thing doesn't work for me, it's not helping my portfolio.
My 6040 is awful, right?
But I can't just be long equities, but I need some yield, I'm a boomer, I'm old, I need some you know, some enhancement, but I want equities upside.
And we've talked about this so many times, and it's true, you know, because the assets keep growing.
All these yield enhancement vehicles, all these income vehicles, they're selling equity optionality.
So your long underlying equities, you cap that upside to a certain extent, but you're generating yield by selling options.
That's the new fixed income.
And those flows matter because those flows, then when the kind of the coast is clear, they just come in and it's just Vegas supply, and it just smashes vol back down.
Thank you so much for for coming on at short notice.
It's seven in the morning.
Seven in the morning.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, midday.
Yeah, your day's over, right?
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