Quadruple Witching Roils Market, Sparking Bursts of Volume
- Friday’s event seen as the last ‘liquidity window’ of 2020
- Tesla’s S&P 500 addition added layer of uncertainty to the mix
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In a year that’s seen the market bombarded by wild swings and violent rotations, traders just got blasted by a surge of trading volume.
Equity transactions spiked Friday amid a quarterly event known as quadruple witching, when options and futures on indexes and equities expire. About 16 billion shares changed hands, 53% above the average in the past three months, as the S&P 500 Index erased about two-thirds of its losses during the last 30 minutes of trading.