The Hour of the Witch
Today is known on Wall Street as Quadruple Witching Day, which occurs four times a year and is a day on which stock index futures, stock index options, stock options and single stock futures expire.
In other words this is a time when the market volume and volatility increase dramatically due to a confluence of delivery, exercising, arbitrage and speculative trading activity, mostly on the part of experienced trading professionals.
Got that?
According to Wikipedia, the term “witching hour” comes from European folklore. It is “the hour of midnight when witches, demons and ghosts are most powerful and the forces of black magic are the most effective.” In Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii, Shakespeare refers to "the witching time of night":
‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
As we common folk try to make sense of the markets and try to make good decisions about where to invest, do we want to be answering the call of hell‘s bells and “drinking hot blood” today?
Follow Technorati