It feels like there’s a lot going on these days. In part, that’s because there is.

There’s no shortage of geopolitical fireworks, for example. And you can take “fireworks” figuratively and literally.

Headlines read like a Cold War spy novel. A notorious warlord known to the Western world as “Putin’s chef” just attempted to overthrow the Russian military command in a mutinous conspiracy with “General Armageddon,” who hasn’t been seen or heard from since. The chef was exiled to Belarus, home to a cache of tactical nuclear weapons which “Europe’s last dictator” agreed to store on behalf of the Kremlin. We’re living in a James Bond script.

It’s not just that. The US-China bilateral relationship remains dangerously fraught. No sooner had Antony Blinken left Beijing than Joe Biden insulted Xi Jinping in public, prompting a swift backlash from China’s foreign ministry, where spokeswoman Mao Ning accused Biden of “seriously violating China’s political dignity” by calling Xi a tyrant. The tech war between the world’s two superpowers is ongoing, and a fresh escalation is expected soon+.

Then there’s America’s turbulent domestic situation, which is best described as a political melee intermingled with a simmering socioeconomic crisis. The tension is unbearable. And I mean that. You can feel it when you’re out in public.

Through it all, though, US equities are undaunted — “unperturbed” is actually the better adjective for our purposes here.

“Loving the leisurely pace of midweek summer days, pinning under dealer long gamma from a world of ‘short straddle / vol-sellers’ seemingly loaded everywhere you turn, versus few if any willing buyers of vol and/or hedgers,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott remarked.

The calm could end suddenly and violently, “Thanksgiving turkey-style,” as Charlie put it this week, in a nod to Taleb, but it’s important to understand what’s going on behind the scenes to create and facilitate the lull.

“Between the flows into income / overwrite / underwrite funds, as well as the current profitability and risk-adjusted returns of systematic gamma / straddle sellers and finally, the obvious re-proliferation of dispersion teams everywhere around the Street, there is simply too much vol supply and vol-selling at the index level,” McElligott wrote, juxtaposing that with “no buyers of index vol,” which he explained by reference to low net exposures (in a longer-term, historical context) from traditional buyers of hedges.

He flagged a dynamic I’ve mentioned here on too many occasions recently to count. Correlation has collapsed.

That’s another factor “bleeding” realized vol, Charlie remarked.

So, how does it all go the way of the Thanksgiving turkey? Well, you could argue that a macro event or a geopolitical flashpoint should be just the thing, but apparently not. There’s no shortage of those and… well, crickets from markets.

“Perhaps what is required is a proper ‘Correlation 1’ event where the current dispersion wave reverses,” McElligott went on to say, noting that such a catalyst could come from the long side or the short side. “In the meantime, we hurry up and wait,” he wrote. “Crunched under the daily range suppression.”