Everyone loves a good, rollicking crash-up, but lest we should forget in our zeal to witness and, ideally, participate in, a blow-off top for equities, such episodes tend to be unstable.

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s second White House conquest, US stocks exhibited signs of “FOMO,” as under-exposed discretionary investors chased a rally turbocharged by the en masse abandonment of downside hedges on the clearing of the election event risk.

That panic grab for upside manifested as steeper call skew and threatened to morph into a “spot-up, vol-up” conjuncture which, while exhilarating, tends to get dicey sooner or later. Take your martinis stirred and your rallies deliberate. Never shaken, never frenzied.

If that’s you (i.e., if you prefer a measured, steady rally to a hair-on-fire crash-up) I have constructive news: Things have calmed down a bit. Systematic option-selling flows are back, which in turn means we’re getting that nice insulation sprayed into the walls on either side of spot. You can see that in the top-right chart, below (click to enlarge, as always).

On the left is the familiar figure which gives you some context for AUM growth in the income ETF space, from which a fair amount of the vol supply overhang mentioned above enmanates.

The charts are, of course, from Nomura’s Charlie McElligott, who’s pretty much the only strategist worth reading. On the research side of things, I like BMO’s US rates team. Other than Charlie and BMO’s Ian Lyngen, both of whom are outstanding, I can take it or leave it with the sell-side stuff at this point to be honest.

Anyway, Charlie described a newly “benevolent backdrop” defined by a “powerful resumption of vega supply from the VRP universe [which] is absolutely stuffing dealers on long gamma.” If you’re wondering why we’ve seemingly slipped into an “unchanged” market, that’s a big part of it.

On Nomura’s estimates, there’s $10 billion to buy into a 1% selloff or $10 billion to sell into a 1% rally. That’s your insulation, and it should be contrasted with what McElligott described as the “far more unstable spot-up, vol-up scenario” defined by “force-ins,” panic grabs and dealer gamma squeezes, which tend to “eventually collapse under the weight of their own delta.”