If you’re curious to know what’s in store for markets following next week’s epoch-making election in the US, you could consult April 12, 1861, January 6, 2021 or, if you’re a glass half-full type, the historical analogues for benchmark US equities and various measures of vol.

My relatively benign societal base case for the country assumes the vast majority of Americans are far too lazy to engage in any sort of protracted conflict. After all, there’s a lot of KFC to eat, a lot of NFL to watch, a ton of Netflix to binge and Elf will be aired back-to-back-to-back for two months straight starting in a matter of days. Who’s got time for armed, ideological struggle?

Assuming most of the country’s not up for a live-fire, Gettysburg reenactment, the post-election trade’s probably up for stocks and lower for vol. If “we clear clustered event risks, volatility resets lower,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott reminded investors on Wednesday.

The figures above, from Charlie, show the post-election analogues for vol and also for vol-of-vol.

Looks pretty promising, no? Particularly when you remember that, as per Charlie’s maxim, “volatility is your exposure toggle.” Whether you realize it or not, everyone’s operating under the same risk-management framework, at least conceptually: Exposure’s dialed up into vol crushes, and dialed back (i.e., down) into vol expansions.

That goes hand-in-hand with bullish equity seasonals. The median return for big-tech (i.e., the Nasdaq 100) from late-October through December 31 during election years looking back four decades is better than 7%. It’s nearly 10% for US small-caps.

As for Election Night and the prospect that the winner won’t be known with enough certainty for markets to trade the results, Goldman says don’t worry about it. They didn’t put it quite that way, but that was the gist of an October 29 note by Michael Cahill, Lexi Kanter and Alec Phillips, who said that even though polls show “a tight race, there are many plausible scenarios that would allow for a relatively clear election outcome early in the night.”

It’s not worth penning a belabored editorial around Goldman’s efforts to explain why, in all likelihood, markets (or some markets anyway) will be able to trade a probable winner by the cash open on Wall Street November 6. It’s a combination of prob & stats, “somewhat reduced” mail-in voting and the capacity for poll watchers to extrapolate based on cross-state correlation for voter turnout “and many other sources of polling errors.”

The bank did say that the composition of Congress may not be known as quickly, which could introduce more ambiguity into rates markets given their focus on fiscal policy compared to FX, which cares more about tariffs than anything else. As for stocks, Cahill, Kanter and Phillips offered the following:

Equity market participants are likely to be particularly attuned to changes to corporate tax and regulation. Here, the presidential outcome has the primary effect, as these policies would be likely to turn in a market-friendly direction in a Trump scenario, regardless of congressional control. That said, a determination that the Senate majority has flipped to Republicans would preclude a Democratic sweep, reducing the odds of corporate tax increases and of tighter regulatory policies via legislation (Democrats have pledged to eliminate the legislative filibuster in a sweep, potentially opening the door to broader regulatory changes than would be likely under existing laws). In light of this, outcomes in a few key Senate races could be relatively important for equities, in particular.

In other words: Anything but higher taxes. Regulations are bad too, but higher taxes are a fate worse than death. Just ask the Founders who, if we’re honest, were angrier at taxes than they were enamored with high-minded ideas about equality and democracy.

Oh, and folks, don’t delude yourself: Donald Trump will dispute the results if he loses. If nothing else is certain, that much is. And the Supreme Court’s in his pocket.