Just five minutes before Wall Street’s close, the Standard & Poor’s 500 erased a slide that earlier in the session exceeded 1%. The index closed up 0.08% on the day. The NASDAQ Composite added 0.52%. The CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) dropped 2.63% to 19.28.
These relatively minor directional moves came despite huge volume. Today was a Triple Expiration Day, commonly called triple witching day, a quarterly event when three types of financial derivatives contracts–stock options, stock index options, and stock index futures, all expire simultaneously. (Triple witching occurs on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December.)
Almost 21 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges–the biggest trading volume in 2025.
The small size of the directional move is a reflection of a huge disagreement between institutional and individual investors.Trend-following systematic funds turned net short on U.S. stocks for the first time in more than a year. These commodity trading advisers, or CTAs, which follow trends in market direction, cut their exposure to the S&P 500 to the lowest level since 2023, according to Goldman Sachs. Meantime, individual traders pumped more than $12 billion into U.S. equities in the week ending March 19, according to JPMorgan Chase.
