Late last week, Goldman’s Scott Rubner cautioned that “everyone’s in the pool.”

By that he of course meant “in” equities, on the back of retail investor dip-buying, 401k inflows, buybacks and various manifestations of “start-of-the-year” stock allocating.

That, at a time when the seasonal’s about to turn unfavorable and ahead of what’ll probably be contentious fiscal wrangling in D.C., where Donald Trump’s bent on enshrining as many of his domestic policy priorities into law as possible in one fell swoop, a task that’ll be challenging in light of Republicans’ razor-thin majority and House GOPer‘s penchant for infighting.

And then there’s the incessant drum beat of trade war headlines emanating from The White House. Maybe the tariff threat’s overstated maybe it isn’t, but some argue the juxtaposition between, on one hand, a staggering spike in trade policy uncertainty and, on the other, measures of risk appetite, including near record-low fund manager cash levels, is simply too glaring to ignore.

Apropos, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott on Wednesday alluded to latent risks from “sized-up positioning” in an uncertain world. On the bank’s estimate, long/short gross exposure is 94%ile, as illustrated on the left, below.

On the retail side, Charlie described “extremely high sentiment,” which he proxied with leveraged ETF AUM, shown on the right, above (click to enlarge, as always).

At the same time, the grind lower in trailing realized dictated a meaningful re-allocation bid from the vol control universe, where US equity futures demand over the past month came to more than $61 billion on McElligott’s tally.

That allocation’s not dangerously extreme (~70%ile), but the go-forward’s asymmetric, which is to say vol control’s a bigger seller on “movement” than buyer on calm. “At the very least, this recent source of demand now looks set to dry up,” Charlie said. “Any expansion of rVol from here would be an increasingly larger sell flow.” The only scenario that’d see vol control buying more over the next month is a flat market (i.e., an SPX that averages “unchanged” each session).

As for CTAs, their net equity exposure’s 90%ile on Nomura’s estimates.

And yet, McElligott didn’t sound overly concerned on Wednesday. “The coil is ever-so-slowly being loaded for a vol squeeze within US equities, but I don’t believe we’re in position for a big de-risk just yet,” he wrote.