Matt Levine, Columnist

People Are Worried About the Stock Market

Also VIX ETPs, Morgan Stanley, crypto-Ponzi hacking and Uber.

February 6, 2018 at 3:06 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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People are worried that people aren't worried oh wait no.

On November 30 of last year, the S&P 500 Index closed at a new all-time high of 2647.58, up 18.3 percent for the year thus far. Two days earlier, Bloomberg Markets had published "What to Worry About in This Surreal Bull Market." "Equities keep hitting record highs and volatility hovers near historic lows, all while geopolitical tensions abound," the article began, and then it compiled worries from investors and strategists and pundits who worried that the party would eventually have to end. Would leveraged quant-fund unwinds finally bring down the long bull market? "Some sort of cyber event"? Weaknesses in China's financial system? Stresses to stock-exchange closing auctions? Over-reliance on index funds? Contagion from a Bitcoin crash? Concentration in repo markets? Really anything was possible; a long period of calm optimism had given people a lot of free time to imagine horrible counterfactuals.