For all the hand-wringing over whether the US stock market is in a bubble, investors who have been hedging against a downturn are now getting worried about missing a potential year-end rally.
That’s the message coming from derivatives markets, where a measure of the relative cost of bullish options reached a high not seen since January. Protection against a downturn, which had been rising as the S&P 500 Index pushed to record after record, has started to get cheaper.