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Wall Street’s measure for expected equities market volatility has fallen below 11 for the first time since August 2015, a month remembered not for its calm but for the turbulence that followed.

The CBOE’s Vix index, a widely tracked measure of implied volatility, fell on Wednesday by as much as 0.52 to 10.93 points, according to Bloomberg data. That is the first time it has slipped below the 11 mark since August 5 2015.

The Vix has plunged from as high as 23 in the days leading up to the presidential election as Donald Trump’s shock victory has sent stocks zooming higher on a fairly smooth path despite initial expectations that exactly the opposite would happen.

The S&P 500 has tacked on 6 per cent since election day and has on only two occasions closed with a gain of greater than 1 per cent.

The benchmark US equity barometer has not closed down more than 0.81 per cent over the period.

The move lower for the Vix “is an indication that investors have virtually eliminated the prospect of market turmoil from the investing equation over the near term” and points to a “very high level of investor confidence for the prospects of higher equity prices”, said Peter Kenny, senior market strategist at Global Markets Advisory Group.

Still, the fall below 11 is an uneasy reminder that traders sometimes get it wrong. On August 20 2015, just over two weeks after the Vix slipped below 11, the US markets were roiled by a jolt in China’s financial markets.

The S&P dropped 2.1 per cent that day, then 3.2 per cent the following day. A 3.9 per cent slide followed on Monday of the following week, sending the Vix surging as high as 53.29.

There have been signs that a rise in volatility could be on the horizon this time round as well.

The difference between anticipated fluctuations in the Vix and realised ones climbed this week to a one-year high “in a sign volatility may pick up significantly in the new year”, according to research by Mandy Xu, a derivatives strategist at Credit Suisse.

Mr Kenny echoed that sentiment, saying that “it is precisely at these depressed levels that smart money picks up cheap insurance” against an uptick in volatility.

At the same time, investors may have grown too optimistic in their confidence in Mr Trump’s ability to stoke economic growth through a mixture of government spending, lower taxes and less regulation, said David Kelly, chief global strategist at the JPMorgan Funds.

The S&P 500 has catapulted to fresh record highs since the election while the Dow has flirted with surpassing the 20,000 mark for the first time in history.

But the rise has brought to the fore worries that stock prices could be bubbling ahead of profitability.

The forward 12-month price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 has ticked up to 17.2-times, from 16.4 on election day, and 16.1 at the end of last year, according to data from FactSet Research Systems.

“It seems that global equity markets are pricing in everything that could go right in the US and everything that could go wrong overseas,” Mr Kelly said.