"...the next two weeks promise to be volatile for stocks for two reasons: first, there is a rather massive option expiration set for this Friday (with some caveats), and then for quarter end, we are facing what appears to be one of the biggest pension fund dumps in history.
Starting with this Friday's Op-Ex, Goldman's Rocky Fishman writes that from a purely "headline" perspective, June's expiration is massive with $1.8 trillion in SPX options expiring on the 19th..... making it the third-largest non-December expiration on record, in addition to $230bln of SPY options and $250bln of options on SPX and SPX E-mini futures.....
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The June open interest is 43% calls, higher than the 35-40% that is typical, but most of the elevated call activity is in the form of in-the-money calls (after investors had chased the rally by buying calls and sold calls to fund protection in the last few months).
The biggest wildcard, according to Goldman, is the concentration in ultra short-term momentum chasing. As a result of the aggressive momentum-chasing, soon-to-expire option volume has exploded: over the course of Q2 2020, there has been an acceleration of final day trading of SPX options that expire every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Most such expirations had over $100bln notional trade on their final day, "making them a potentially large, but hard-to-track, source of gamma."
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One thing we do know for certain, however, is that pension selling will be substantial, as a result of the outperformance of stocks over bonds this quarter. Indeed, according to Goldman, as of the close on Tuesday, the desk’s theoretical model estimates a net $76bn of equities to sell, the third largest estimate on record,
www.zerohedge.com/markets/...-76-billion-pension-selling-deck