If you were concerned that the policy divergence between Jerome Powell’s Fed and Kazuo Ueda’s Bank of Japan might manifest this week in a renewed blast of yen strength to the detriment of risk assets, you can step away from the ledge.

Following the BoJ decision (they were on hold obviously), Ueda all but removed the possibility of a third rate hike in October when he told reporters that inflation risks “appear to be easing” on the back of “recent yen strength.” Policymakers have “some time” to consider the data and the outlook, he went on. So, again, no hike on October 31.

Ueda wants to hike again. And he will hike again. But not until December 19 at the earliest. “Our decision on monetary policy will depend on economic, price and financial developments,” he said Friday. “If our economic and price forecasts are achieved, we will raise rates and adjust the degree of monetary support accordingly.”

Following Ueda’s Friday presser, the yen weakened sharply, capping what was on track to be its largest weekly decline against the dollar since January.

Some worried (aloud) that the combination of a 50bps rate cut from the Fed this week and a BoJ which, at the least, would reaffirm plans to keep raising rates at some point in the not-so-distant future, was a recipe for more yen appreciation. As we’ve seen in recent months, rapid yen appreciation can be problematic.

The entire world (not really, but hyperbole’s a fixture of this discussion) was running some version of yen-funded carry. At the beginning of July, USDJPY was ~162. At the lows on August 5 (i.e., the day the Nikkei imploded), dollar-yen was ~142. That’s a helluva move, and it evidenced funding-leg carnage.

By late August, the spec short in the yen evaporated. Indeed, it was a net long by mid-month. Needless to say, the short unwind (illustrated below) perpetuated yen strength in the same way the structural nature of yen-funded carry was part and parcel of yen weakness. That speaks to the self-referential nature of short vol trades.

According to SocGen’s Kit Juckes, the yen had become nearly 70% undervalued versus the dollar on a PPP basis just prior to the reversal. He called that “truly extraordinary.” “Once the yen became [that] cheap, the risk of a sharp correction was significant, though forecasting the exact point at which that might happen was never going to be easy,” Juckes wrote, in a September 12 note recapping six months worth of FX history. Once the tide turned in late July, “the hot money [and] the hedge fund community shifted positions very fast,” he added.

So, look, this was July’s story. Early that month, “serious” market participants were staring at a historic overvaluation for the dollar and a large, structural spec yen short, which they knew was “inherently unstable,” to employ Juckes’s characterization. But nobody knew when it was going to tip over. In hindsight, the July BoJ meeting was a natural candidate for that tipping point but… well, that’s hindsight for you. 20/20. Everything’s obvious when you know how it turned out.

As far as this week goes, I don’t know a polite way to say this, so I won’t try: By the time you read about something as a retail investor, it’s not just too late to trade it, it’s almost too late to even talk about it. Was it possible that the sharp contrast between i) a dovish Fed that’s pivoting to rate cuts and ii) a BoJ that has designs on getting Japanese real rates closer to positive territory over the next six months would drive additional yen strength and forced unwinds in yen-funded bets on — I don’t know — Nvidia? Sure. Anything’s possible.

But was it advisable for everyday people to sell big US tech ahead of this week’s central bank meetings on the notion that there was a giant, yen-funded Mag7 long lurking out there somewhere just waiting to be undone by an errant Powell remark on Wednesday or some hawkish body language from Ueda on Friday? No. Certainly not. That isn’t the kind of reasoning that everyday people should be trading on. There are too many damn moving parts. If you want to be bearish on mega-cap US tech and you’re an “everyday economic person,” as Powell once described Main Street, try Occam’s razor: Big tech’s riding high and the (tautological) key to investing success is “buy low, sell high.”

All of that said, the relevance of this story — the dramatized tale of global yen carry unwind — will wax and wane, which is to say it’ll return to the fore at some point. And there probably will be additional bouts of market tumult — mild, acute or somewhere in-between — associated with the BoJ’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the world’s most ambitious experiment in ultra-accommodative monetary policy in an environment when the bank’s global counterparts are pivoting to easing.

As to when the next bout of yen-related market tumult will unfold, it’s hard to say. But I promise to pinpoint it for you with a very high degree of accuracy. After the fact.