Last week, Goldman suggested it might be time for investors to hedge. Their rationale is as follows:

Sounds plausible, right? Goldman even went so far as to provide you with a handy bullet point list of tautological hedging instructions like “hedge when you think the risk is greatest” – that's in case you don't know what hedges is or what they does (to borrow a deliberate grammar error in the service of humor from Thornton's regulation headline).

Bloomberg's Dani Burger picked up on that theme for a recent piece, noting that the Cboe SKEW Index “has been falling for the last two weeks, and is now two standard deviations below its average level [while] another options-based gauge, the credit Suisse Fear Barometer, hit its lowest level since 2016 on Monday.”