It was an interesting week in global markets, to say the least. After an over-extended period of complacency, volatility reared its ugly head, triggering forced selling that allowed some of the most crowded trades in recent memory to come unwound. Just look at Crude oil futures or the short yen trade, both of which have over 80% of speculators on one side, and both reversed quite significantly last week because of outside forces. While looking at positioning data may be backward looking, this week’s Commitment of Traders (COT) report offers some insight to how things for the market may play out over the coming days and weeks.

No matter how you look at it, technicals also played a key role in this past week’s price-action. First, entering this past week, most equity indices (especially the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100) were already in position to sell off. Both had marked bearish key reversal patterns on weekly charts, at already eye-popping overbought levels (weekly and monthly RSI). And, with record low volatility for such an extended period of time, the markets were due for some sort of pullback.

Of course after the fact, market participants always seemed obsessed in figuring out what happened and why. For example, we learned that a record inflow of retail money was chasing equities for the month of January. For those that follow my weekly analysis, know that I often point out that the retail trader is often too early or too late to the game, and in this case it seems to be the latter.

We also learned about these ultra-short VIX ETF or ETN’s that blew-up, and apparently were behind why the market moved so much. The fact is, these instances offer-up interesting insights, but reveal nothing about what is yet to come.

Besides equities, the most crowded trades in the futures markets (according to the most recent COT report) are Oil, the short yen trade, Gold futures, and the euro. And, if you weren’t hiding under a rock, you almost surely noticed that all four of these reversed hard this past week.