When it comes to the species, I’m a committed bear.

The short case for humanity’s pretty strong, in my view. Ask Asheville, North Carolina. Or Mariupol, in Ukraine. Or Gaza City. Or Israelis huddled under a freeway. Or a starving North Korean. Or someone — anyone, really — in Yemen. I could go on. Unfortunately, I could go on.

But when it comes to markets, I’m pretty agnostic, which is to say neither a committed bear nor a dedicated bull. Once upon a time, when I first started writing for public consumption some eight years ago, I pretended to be a permabear, because that’s what I thought people wanted to read. I grew weary of that pretty quick, though. I can’t sustain disingenuity. It’s not my thing.

Jim Cramer — who, in my limited first-hand experience, is pretty weird in person — likes to say there’s “always a bull market somewhere.” He’s generally full of sh-t in my opinion, but on that point he’s right. Although I’d perhaps modify his catchphrase to say there’s always a bull narrative somewhere. In a lot of cases, those narratives have at least as much, and very often more, merit than bear narratives. Stocks do go up over time, after all. (Whether we, the species, have that time is another matter. To quote Phil Connors, legend among legends, “Well what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!”)

As things stand currently, the bear narrative’s pretty straight forward: Soft landings for the US economy are exceedingly rare, Fed hiking cycles “always break something” (and this hiking cycle was uniquely aggressive), equity market concentration’s extreme on any number of metrics, AI might be a bubble (it might also be a revolution on par with the wheel and the personal computer, but it’s too early to know for sure), valuations are commensurately rich and, panning out to the 30,000-foot view mentioned above, the space rock we live on is dying, and even if Mother Nature doesn’t intend to kill us, we’re hell-bent on killing each other.

Compelling? I think so, but some of that bear case isn’t amenable to hedging and… well, you know what they say about equities’ penchant for prolonged irrationality: They can, and usually will, outlast your solvency in a staring contest.

But enough of all that. What’s going to happen tomorrow? Or next month? Or next year? Because in the (exceedingly bitter, invariably lonely) end, we’re all dead. Here’s what Nomura’s Charlie McElligott had to say on Wednesday about the near- to medium-term bear case (i.e., downside, left-tail risks) and bull case (i.e., upside, right-tail risks), complete with an annotated, color-coded dealer gamma profile chart that harkens to Tuesday’s “Meanwhile, In The Equity Vol Space“:

Yes, of course there is macro “event risk” out there with i) extreme market sensitivity to each and every US labor- and global growth- data release as it relates to central bank easing path trajectories (particularly with the Fed back to “data-dependency” mode again with their one-trick-pony of “labor market” as the singular FOMC reaction function) and now in much more real-time fashion ii) the risk of transitioning from proxy war to full-blown hot war between Israel and Iran, and all that before iii) the standard US presidential election “October surprise” risk in a margin-of-error coin-flip race, and running concurrent to iv) a US port strike with all sorts of implications back into consumer sentiment / inflation data / election-impact potentials

[But once you] get through [the] election / “data-dependency” risk events, [you] still [have] global easing / China stimulus / bipartisan “economic populism” — i.e. deficit spending to the moon regardless of election outcome — so you may then get that perverse “capitulation” / “tap-out” of forced hedges thereafter, which can then spring-board you into year-end. Hence SPX 6000-type Calls into the massive gamma at that DecQ strike.

God bless Charlie. If every human job on Wall Street ends up automated, let’s save just this one.

As the meme goes, “Protect this man at all costs.”