The earliest of this week’s trade on Wall Street was a bit difficult to parse, and indeed I doubt seriously the utility of parsing any one day’s price action outside of sessions where there’s a clearly identifiable catalyst.

Stepping back from the mercurial day-to-day oscillations, there seems to be some agreement around a few things, one of which is the notion that Jerome Powell’s avowed aversion to additional labor market softening — any additional labor market softening — means the Fed now harbors what Nomura’s Charlie McElligott on Monday described as a “convex easing bias.”

That’s the macro-policy narrative. As for “pure markets” dynamics, those with their fingers on the pulse of things generally agree there’s considerable scope for additional systematic re-risking, volatility permitting of course. Goldman’s Scott Rubner, for example, sees nearly $11 billion of CTA demand per day from now until the end of the month. The managed futures crowd has already added back risk purged into the early-August growth scare, but exposure’s not yet extreme.

Vol-control, meanwhile, is just now poised to start taking back up exposure with the one-month trailing window seeing some key days drop from the sample. The figure on the left, below, gives you some context for recent vol-control de-risking.

On the right is a Goldman proxy for risk parity exposure. There’s been no discernible movement there, and generally speaking, risk parity is the slowest of the mechanical flows.

In his Monday missive, McElligott described a meaningful uptick in demand for upside optionality (i.e., calls) in the wake of Powell’s green light. Some of that, he noted, is indicative of a scramble to get back on the clock (so to speak) after equities ran away higher in about-face fashion following the fleeting August 2-August 5 selloff.

The table and chart below, from Nomura Vol, provide still more context for positioning across investor cohorts and types.

“Equities are at risk of leaving people behind yet again [if] FOMO tak[es] over,” McElligott said. “After Powell’s Jackson Hole speech, a new grab into upside calls has (predictably) kicked off.”

Charlie continued. The rally “got away” from investor types who were “forced to net down / gross down after the realized vol shocks from the start of the month, but will now be mechanically forced to take exposures back up as trailing rVol averages down,” he wrote.