Marko Kolanovic – a.k.a. “Gandalf”, a.k.a. the “half-man, half-God” – has a new note out and it’s great.

For the past couple of years, Kolanovic’s research has been hijacked by the doomsday crowd as part of that crowd’s ongoing attempt to justify a bearish lean that has been perpetually and decisively wrong for a solid decade.

It is of course by no means clear that Marko was a willing accomplice in that effort. Kolanovic’s legend has grown in proportion to the market’s interest in the risks posed by the systematic strategies he covers – i.e. risk parity, CTAs, vol. control funds, etc. etc.

His research is what it is. He documents the evolution of those strategies’ exposure and positioning and tries to draw conclusions. Some of his calls/musings have proved prescient and to the extent his implicit (and sometimes explicit) contention that these strategies pose something that approximates a systemic risk has been borne out during risk-off episodes that are exacerbated by systematic de-risking, those of a bearish persuasion are inclined to count Marko as one of their own.

Last month, the day before the above consensus AHE print that accompanied the January jobs report started tipping dominoes, Marko suggested that the market action from the late January highs through February 1 didn’t presage an imminent systematic de-risking episode. That prediction was proven wrong the following day and once Monday, February 5, rolled around and ushered in the short vol. ETP implosion, it was clear that what Marko had been warning about for years was indeed materializing.

And so, he did what one does when one is the business of trying to figure out what’s likely to happen next – he made a prediction. That prediction was pretty straightforward: the systematic unwind is behind us, buy the dip.

That didn’t go over particularly well with the doomsday crowd and to the extent Kolanovic saying “buy the dip” was a bitter pill for the permabears to swallow, that pill became increasingly bitter as the market bounced off the lows and rallied hard the following week, proving that Kolanovic was in fact right – again.