Friday's "quadruple witching" may spell volatility
Wednesday September 17, 11:32 am ET
By Doris Frankel
CHICAGO, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Halloween is still more than a month away, but witches may be at play on Wall Street this Friday brewing up volatile trade with the expiration of options and futures contracts.
"Quadruple witching" -- the term used by pros to describe the expiration of four different options and futures contracts -- takes place each quarter in the stock market on a Friday. The phenomenon could spell sudden spikes and dips in the market as investors at the last minute either exercise their positions or roll them forward.
John Person, head financial analyst with Infinity Brokerage Services, expects to see broomsticks flying on Friday compared to the relatively tame quadruple witching in March and June.
He says investors' differing views in the wake of the Federal Reserve's latest deliberations could lead to volatility. On Tuesday, Fed officials decided to leave U.S. interest rates at 45-year lows and said rates could stay down for a long time to lift an economy that is losing jobs.
"The Fed meeting on Tuesday may have raised doubts that the economy may recover sooner rather than later," Person said. "So in anticipation of lower stock valuations, investors could liquidate their cash positions and thus offset their derivative positions."
On the other hand, Person said, investors who believe the recovery will be well underway by mid 2004 may be seeing this Friday as a continuation of a buying opportunity.
"That is where the volatility comes in, because there are strong views on both sides," he said.
This particular witching also comes on the heels of a slow summer that marks the end of the fiscal year for some corporations and the start of the fourth quarter for others. Fund managers could kick into high gear after the summer doldrums by sprucing up their portfolios for the year-end.
Most September stock index options and some index futures such as the Standard & Poor's 500 (SPU3) cease trading on Thursday and settle on Friday's opening.
Options contracts on the Standard & Poor's 100 (CBOE:^OEX - News) close on Friday afternoon, while individual September stock options stop trading and settle at Friday's close.
This year's newest addition to the brew are single-stock futures, contracts that allow investors to buy or sell 100 shares of an individual stock at a certain price on a set future date.
At OneChicago and NQLX, the two U.S. exchanges that offer futures on individual stocks, September single-stock futures contracts at each exchange will close and settle on Friday. NQLX lists 92 September single-stock futures while 91 September securities contracts are offered on OneChicago.
"I don't expect the expiration of single-stock futures to have a huge impact," said Jim Sauser, head equities trader at Resource Trading Group.
A lot of players have already rolled over their positions in single-stock futures and have increased them in November and December, Sauser said.
Richard Croft, president of Croft Financial Group, a Toronto-based investment firm, does not believe there will be much drama this Friday.
"I just don't think there will be enough offsetting positions in these derivative products to cause any significant distortions in the stock market," Croft said.
"People are interested in this phenomenon because the derivatives market is the the tail that ends up wagging the dog, which is the stock market," Croft said.
in Yahoo Finance (http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/030917/financial_witching_1.html)
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