Tech bubble fear lures investors to hedge with exotic options

The tech-fueled stock rally is looking bubble-like to some investors, and they’re turning to exotic options that better protect against an eventual slump.

The fear-versus-AI Fomo narrative outlined by strategists at the end of 2025 is still in place, with intraday gyrations hinging on President Trump’s next move. Where tariffs were the biggest concern last year, inflation is the bogeyman, with Friday’s slide in the S&P 500 Index spurred by a jump in Treasury yields.

The key difference now is the degree of concentration. A rally driven by a shrinking cohort of stocks inevitably raises concerns, and Bank of America Corporation strategists pointed to US technology, especially semiconductors, as showing bubble-like dynamics.

The challenge: even if an investor correctly identifies a bubble, timing the pop is tough.

That has some traders reaching for exotic options that can help, in particular “lookback” puts, which reset higher as the market rallies. They are a bit more expensive but tend to outperform vanilla puts when a market continues to rise before an eventual plunge.

“We have seen decent client demand for lookback puts as clients hedge the scenario where markets can potentially rally before the sell off,” said Neeraj Chaudhary, Bank of America’s head of exotics and flow for Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as co-head of global hybrids trading. “The lookback put is ideal for this as the strike sets at the max index level over the life of the trade.”

To offset some of the cost, Bank of America also pointed to expanding put spreads, in which the purchase of a lookback put is partly funded by selling a vanilla put at a lower strike.

If the rally reverses, the selloff will likely be more dramatic given the V-shaped recovery following the start of the Iran war, accelerated by rebalancing from levered exchange-traded products.

Their massive growth — especially for those tracking the hottest corners of the tech sector — adds to the sense that the market is fragile. The daily rebalance — in which the ETPs buy additional shares at the close when prices are rising, adding fuel to the rally — would also add exacerbate a plunge.

Barclays Plc strategists wrote that despite significant outflows from ETPs in April, the theoretical buying or selling pressure from levered funds on a 1% S&P 500 move has spiked to about $10.8 billion from some $6 billion at the end of March. They further noted that while they don’t view levered ETPs as a key driver of the recent rally, the rebalancing flows — which have a similar price effect as option dealer short gamma — may be becoming a more important factor at the close.

With Quantitative investment strategies becoming a more mainstream risk management tool, investors have been paying particular attention to how effectively these programmes can adapt to quickly changing market conditions. They’ve their use as markets moved from the initial oil-price shock following the outbreak of the war in Iran to the renewed focus on the artificial intelligence-led rally.

“After the start of the Iran conflict, the role of QIS increasingly shifted from return enhancement towards portfolio defence and macro adaptation,” said Adrien Geliot, chief executive officer of Premialab. “There was dispersion in performance within the QIS universe during the Iran shock window with the best systematic frameworks adapting faster than some discretionary processes as volatility, inflation expectations and cross-asset trends repriced.”

While there is huge value in an effective adaptive strategy, QIS that dynamically trades in and out of assets can frequently behave differently from the model when running money in it. That’s especially true for a parameter such as volatility momentum, which tends to be tricky to use as an excess return signal to trigger entry and exit points on Cboe Volatility Index futures.

“Every crisis is different, with a different trigger point,” said Michele Cancelli, global head of structuring for the multi-asset group and global head of QIS trading and structuring at Citigroup Inc. His team does not try to time the market via volatility momentum, he added. “Those strategies that dynamically trade in/out of, for example, long VIX futures can leave you sidelined without a long vol exposure when you really need it.”

The popular dispersion trade has mostly shaken off drawdowns in the early days of the Iran war, with single-stock volatility — especially in parts of the tech sector such as semiconductors — far outpacing relatively mild increases in indexes. The trade can represent one way to play the fear-vs-FOMO trade given how realized volatility on semis can continue to deliver in the melt-up and then expand even further in a potential collapse.

“In an environment where conviction is high but uncertainty remains elevated, we’re seeing growing interest in thematic custom basket dispersion,” said Richa Singh, a managing director at UBS Investment Bank. “The idea being that single-stock realized vol on a basket of, for example, AI leaders can pay regardless of market direction.”

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