Friday’s market close marked the end of a “triple witching” session where $5.1 trillion in stock index futures, stock index options, and stock options expire simultaneously. September’s triple witching comes the same week as the Federal Reserve kicks off its rate-cutting cycle and a rebalancing of the S&P 500 (^GSPC). eToro US investment and options analyst Bret Kenwell joins Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton to discuss the options playbook after the big day for options traders. “Today was one of the four big expiration dates of the year when it comes to the options market, and you saw that action leading up to today’s session with so much back and forth," Kenwell tells Yahoo Finance. “We had a late day pop in stocks, and a lot of that plays into the expiration, but I think what’s really interesting is when you look at the seasonality in September, it tends to be pretty bad for US stocks, and when you really dial into that seasonality, you see a lot of it comes in the so-called back half of mid-month…so that leaves the door open at least to see some choppiness, some profit taking, or some outright seasonal weakness kind of going into the end of the quarter.” Kenwell says he’s expecting strength in the tech sector after “tech has sort of fallen by the wayside amid all this, you know, breadth expansion…suddenly it’s gone from the favorite stocks, the leadership group to being, I think it’s the fourth or fifth best performer of the year.” Kenwell says there were “a lot of put sales into some of the Magnificent Seven names or a lot of the semiconductor leaders” during downturns earlier in the month. He adds “I don’t know that that’s necessarily the best way for a retail investor to play. It’s probably a more reasonable way to play at this point would be by either buying calls or if they wanted to reduce that cost and limit their upside a bit. Call spread would be a great way to get into it.”
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