2025 U.S. Quadruple Witching Day: Watch Out for Volatility? What It Means and When It Happens

Halloween only comes once a year, but for stock investors there’s an event that shows up once every quarter: Witching Day.
Have you heard this term before?

Even someone who doesn’t know much about stocks can tell that quadruple witching day is a risky day for investors. So what kind of day is it, exactly?

Quadruple Witching Day is a market slang term for the day when the expiration dates of four major derivatives—stock index futures, stock index options, single-stock futures, and single-stock options—all fall on the same date. The name comes from the way markets can swing wildly on that day, as if witches were casting mischief.

Strictly speaking, it’s now really a triple witching day. Trading in single-stock futures on the U.S. OneChicago exchange was halted starting in September 2020.

What does expiration have to do with markets shaking around?
To talk about witching day, we first need to clarify what it means for a derivative to expire.

Derivatives are financial instruments whose value changes based on the price of an underlying asset.
A contract to trade a stock at a predetermined price in the future is one example.
With any contract, when the agreed date approaches, the trade has to be executed.
Ordinary stocks you hold can just sit in your account without much worry, but derivatives are contracts to trade on a specific date. If you want to keep your position, you have to close the existing contract and roll it over into a new one with a later expiration date.

In other words, when expiration arrives, trades are triggered. If the expirations of multiple futures and options line up on the same day, orders cluster together and amplify volatility in the cash market.

High volatility means there is more risk when you trade.
So it’s worth knowing in advance which days are riskier.

In the U.S. market, quadruple witching day falls on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December every year. If we map that onto the 2025 calendar, this year’s quadruple witching days are as follows.

Is the time difference with the U.S. confusing?
In Korea Standard Time, that means the following Saturday.

The final hour before the close on witching day is when volatility spikes the most, and is often called the "Quadruple Witching Hour." In U.S. time, that’s from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.; in Korea, it falls between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. the following day.

Witching Day comes with high trading volume and volatility, but it is hard to say that it has a negative impact on the market. On a weekly basis, the market has often posted positive returns.

According to Quantified Strategies, when comparing Witching Day with a typical options expiration day:

Based on the S&P index, if you exclude Witching Day itself, the week that includes Witching Day has more often risen than not.

In fact, the following week tends to be weaker. Is it because of the ominous name, Witching Day? The term “witching day” was coined because of its volatility, not because of any directional bias, and keeping that in mind may help your investing.