$ARB In this 15 minutes, it directly took down 5.8%. Volume surged to more than 3 times, and at the close it even broke below the lows of 20 five-minute candlesticks.

But interestingly, the open interest is actually shrinking. Over the course of more than an hour, the contract notional dropped by nearly 2 million U. This doesn’t look like shorts moving in to smash the price—it looks more like longs cutting losses to deleverage.

Passive selling has an overwhelming advantage; the buy/sell ratio is 0.74. The drop is pretty solid.

Objectively speaking, with OI down to the 99.6% abnormal percentile—third in the entire pool—this kind of position is either the tail end of a panic or just the very start of a trend accelerating. In any case, the cost-effectiveness of catching the falling knife right now isn’t great.