Wanna see something crazy?!

When it’s me asking, you can safely answer in the emphatic affirmative: “Yes!” If a stranger on the street poses the same question, exercise a little caution, though. (It’s Wednesday, we’re having fun.)

Maybe the figure below counts as crazy, maybe I’m exaggerating, but it’s at least remarkable. The chart’s from Nomura’s Charlie McElligott, and it shows the share of S&P 500 names exhibiting 80%ile or greater one-month skew.

Skew, you’re reminded, is a measure of relative demand for downside protection — “downside hedging tilt,” as Charlie put it.

In plain (or at least plainer) English: It’s exceedingly rare for three-quarters of S&P 500 component stocks to reflect this much relative left-tail concern.

If you’re wondering what history says about the outlook for stocks in the presence of this particular anomaly, the answer, to quote McElligott, is “BIG median returns, high hit rates and high excess returns” on both a medium- and long-term horizon.

There’s the backtest and I gotta tell you: It’s among the more compelling backtests I’ve seen. One caveat, which McElligott readily acknowledged, is that 10’s a very small “n.” The other caveat is the usual boilerplate reminder that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Now to the second of the promised “two” crazy charts.

The figure below, from the same McElligott note, shows you YTD debt and loan supply from the hyper-scalers.

As you can see, we’ve matched 2025 already, and it’s not even mid-March.

That’d be remarkable enough on its own, but the really astounding part is that 2025’s total was 2.5x the previous record. So, we’ve almost 3xed the old record for Amazon + Alphabet + Meta + Microsoft + Oracle debt and loan supply in three months.

Charlie had one word for that on Wednesday: “Sheesh.”