VIX guy just called us...

Regular readers of TME are familiar with the "VIX guy". He is our contra indicator when it comes to VIX as well as short term market directions. Let us remind you of what we wrote about his latest VIX call on Dec 31: "...his latest logic is basically the inverse of what he said in late November. He has also managed picking up the January effect logic and argues for this market to remain trending higher with diminishing volatility. We did not plan to get excited on the last day of the year, but given his perfect track record, executing the first part of the planned long volatility trade suddenly seems like a good idea." We suggested to look at hedges and pointed out: "...exploring put spreads as a hedge (skew is high)."
This was only twenty days ago and since then a lot of things have changed. The VIX guy called us today outlining his bearish thesis and is basically telling us VIX must go higher: "have you seen the pricing of the rate hikes, tech is going much lower bro, Fed is behind the curve, ARKK is crashing etc". Given his perfect track record (inversely speaking), we find closing out those put spreads and any long vol trades very attractive (would even consider shorting some vols to fit direction trades).
SPX is at must hold levels and VIX has already spiked big. So far we haven't seen the "real" panic in VIX, but note that we are at the same VIX levels as we hit during the early autumn correction, which in our view looks very similar to the current draw down (SPX below the 100 day and hitting the longer term trend line).