We might enter 2026 with a 12 handle VIX. SPY just broke out and volatility is dead quiet, which usually means trouble is coming

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I don’t think it’s crazy at all to be bearish here with ES around 7000 while SPY is still only ~690.

I have real conviction behind this view. What the market is reacting to right now is how suppressed the VIX is.

The last major top didn’t happen on panic, it happened on complacency. SPY was green, and the VIX was also green that same morning. That was the tell. The drop didn’t come instantly, it came after the delay.

That’s the key point people miss: you don’t just wait for the VIX to spike, you wait for the lagged SPY reaction that follows. That’s only if you’re trying to time a perfect entry.

If you want to catch the move, you have to already be in position. By the time everything lines up clean and obvious, a large portion of the move is usually gone.

End-of-year trading, especially these final four days, is usually low-quality and deceptive. The real movement typically starts in early January. If the market doesn’t crack early January, it often glides higher into the end of the month just like this.

Things don’t start getting spicy until February 19th. We saw a lot of chop and back-and-forth into February last year before the final tariff breakaway breakdown.

Timing matters more than opinions, and this window has a very specific rhythm.