As Wall Street traders come to grips with the Federal Reserve’s plans to slow the pace of interest-rate cuts, Friday’s US options expiration that has historically stoked turbulence offers a final hurdle to end-of-year calm.
The quarterly “triple-witching” will see some $6.5 trillion worth of options tied to individual stocks, indexes and exchange-traded funds fall off the board — this year’s largest and among the biggest on record, though still slightly smaller than a year ago, according to an estimate from derivatives analytical firm Asym 500.