We’ve just witnessed a “legendary” upside grab in US equities.

That’s according to everyone’s favorite cross-asset derivatives strategist, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott, who on Monday provided for a bit of early-week comic relief via a set of charts illustrating the “MTD” ratio of realized vol on up days for the main US benchmarks versus down-day vol.

I put “MTD” in scare quotes for obvious reasons: We’re only six trading sessions in, so this is more for entertainment purposes than anything else, which Charlie readily acknowledged.

“This will normalize over the course of the month as we get more days in the count, but up to this point it’s been comedy to watch,” he wrote.

The figures above show you what he means by “comedy.” So far, up-day vol’s 22 and down-day vol 3 on the S&P. The ratio’s the highest since 1986, and by a country mile.

What’s going on with that? Well, it’s a manifestation of the same dynamics discussed here last week in the colorfully-titled “Lazarus On Biker Speed.”

In the wake of July’s momentum unwind (aka, “baby’s first margin call“), a lot of folks were “caught flat-footed into the booming earnings season and another hilarious ‘Iran ceasefire v.33′” which, in addition to being “a generic risk-on, was a second-order dovish Fed impulse as crude was lit on fire,” McElligott wrote. “So, chase back ‘in.'”

Part and parcel of that chase was an aggressive bid for upside, which drove an absurdist steepening in call skew.

A corollary of the right-tail repricing was an equally dramatic crunch for skew and put skew which, as the figures above show, are now through the cellar and into the sub-basement.

Charlie summed it up. “An under-positioned buy-side chase[d] back into upside as calls went crazy bid, while downside got smoked as spot index exploded higher and away from hedge strikes,” he wrote.

Suffice to say the only fear on display in the earliest of this month’s equity trade was that of missing out.