The most read story on Bloomberg as of 8 PM ET on Monday was called “Wall Street Is Warning Investors to Get Ready for Stocks to Drop.”

I hate that for people. Really I do. That they’re that uninteresting. So uninteresting that of all the God-only-knows-how-many stories available to read on Bloomberg’s overflowing homepage, they flocked to that one: A handful of wholly nebulous quotables from “Chief Equity” something or others, stitched together by a couple of underpaid journalism grads whose prose only sounds good by comparison to the stilted modulation of sell-side research departments.

That’s pretty rich coming from me, ain’t it? After all, how many of those articles did I write last week? Hell, I wrote two today. This one makes three, I guess.

In my defense, I’m more discerning these days when choosing who to quote. Time was, I’d quote anybody with an access card to the elevator bank at a Manhattan skyscraper. You could’ve been Bob Nobody, night janitor at 200 West, and you would’ve been “Goldman’s Robert Somebody” to me if you bothered to jot down a best guess for the S&P on company stationery.

And you know what the f-cked up thing is? Bob Nobody’s guess will be just as good as Robert Somebody’s five times out of 10. But Bob makes $65k and Robert makes $650k.

Sorry, I’m in “album mode,” so to speak. When I’m waist-deep in a Monthly Letter, as I am now, the “real me” cadence spills over into the regular articles. (That Monthly’s coming, by the way. Be patient. It’ll be worth the wait. It always is.)

So, who’s “warning investors” about a stock drop? Who were the stars of Bloomberg’s most-read Monday evening article? There’s a Mike in there. Wilson. You all know Mike. He sees good odds for a correction, but he’s a “buyer of dips.” Julian Emanuel’s in there too. Readers likely know him as well. He reckons stocks might drop as much as 15%. Nobody expects a sustained drawdown. (“Look out below! But maybe buy the dip down there.”)

For what it’s worth, some market participants were hedging late last week. Friday was a wake up call, even as Monday’s rally suggested the NFP-related theatrics might’ve been a false alarm. The charts below are, of course, from Nomura’s Charlie McElligott.

In the upper left-hand corner you’re looking at relative demand for downside versus upside. On the bottom left is relative demand for crash-up “protection” versus at-the-money calls. On the bottom right is relative demand for meltdown protection (no scare quotes) versus at-the-money puts.

Taken together, the visuals reflect growing concern for downside and fading FOMO. And yet, as discussed here in “If Nobody Sees It, It Didn’t Happen,” the lack of bearish aftershocks to start the week makes for a stark contrast with the melodrama witnessed at the beginning of August last year.

“The onus is now on the bears for follow-through beyond just roll-down hedges, otherwise rich vol gets monetized and sold,” Charlie wrote. That, even as the decisive shift in the data prompted a sharp dovish reaction in rates.

The figures above show how SOFR-implied odds of various “landing” scenarios shifted in the aftermath of the jobs report. The chances of two cuts (call that a “moderately rough” landing) in 2025 more than doubled, while the chances of four or more cuts (a full-on hard landing) tripled.

Equities, McElligott went on, are hoping that any additional 2025 rate cut premium (say, beyond 50bps priced) can be plausibly attributed to “continued disinflation while earnings continue to hold the line.”

If, on the other hand, incremental dovishness in the US front-end is seen as a response to a labor market where the normalization process “accelerat[es] from ‘cooler’ into outright contraction, it now seems quite obvious” that bad news will be treated by stocks as just plain old bad news, he added.