The thing people keep getting wrong about the current vol regime is assuming it decays on its own. It doesn't. Somebody has to come and take the other side . Set the scene first. For most of this month equity vol has behaved backwards. Sell-offs have not produced a vol bid, rallies have not produced a vol offer. That is the reverse of how this market normally works, and the cause is that the street is long skew rather than short it. Now the bit that matters. For the normal reflexes to come back, dealers have to be short skew again. And the only way that happens is if clients turn up and buy skew back off them in size. It isn't time that fixes it and it isn't a news event. It's flow. So the question I'm sitting with is whether that demand arrives next week, or whether we wait until the end of August, when the current expiry clears out and the positioning resets by itself. There's a second effect underneath all this that I think is underappreciated. The inventory the street is carrying is supportive. It holds the market up on dips, and it also caps how much of a bid vol can catch when we do sell off.