Traders see no major volatility spike, even as $5 trillion in triple-witching options expire Friday

Markets are staring down a week packed with chaos triggers, but traders aren’t twitching. A $5 trillion triple-witching options expiry lands on Friday, just two days after the Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates.

And yet, no one is betting on a volatility surge, not yet. That’s straight from a Bloomberg report that broke this story wide open.

The Fed, under Jerome Powell, is widely expected to cut rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday. That move is already priced in. What’s not priced in is Powell’s tone during the press conference.

Traders aren’t waiting for the cut; they’re watching for clues on how deep and how fast rate cuts could come next. The focus now moves to the labor market, with key data coming in over the next few weeks that could push Powell’s hand.

Volatility stays low as eyes turn to jobs and Powell’s tone

Options traders are positioning for small swings. Citigroup sees just a 0.72% move expected for Wednesday’s Fed meeting and a 0.78% move around the October 3 nonfarm payrolls report. That’s tame for a week when most dealers are usually on edge.

Stuart Kaiser, who runs U.S. equity-trading strategy at Citi, said the real jolt will come if the employment data collapses. “If you threw up a minus 50k payrolls next month, you’re gonna get vol higher,” Stuart said. “You probably need the unemployment rate to be around 4.5%.”

Last week’s jobless claims already flashed warning signs. Initial claims hit the highest level in nearly four years, setting off alarms across trading desks. That spike came just days after a sweeping jobs revision showed the U.S. had 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported between April 2024 and March 2025.

The slowdown is real, but not a full crash… yet. “We’re not getting this hard landing like collapse in the job market,” said Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute. “This could get rough at some point … but it’s not yet.”

Despite those cracks, the FedWatch tool from CME shows that traders are now pricing in a 76% chance of three rate cuts before the year ends. That’s a big jump from just a few weeks ago, as more traders brace for aggressive easing.

But some are warning not to get too excited. Garrett DeSimone, who runs quant research at OptionMetrics, said past emergency cuts often fool traders. “History shows that during emergency cuts in particular, intraday market returns are usually positive, but medium-term returns often turn negative,” Garrett said. In other words, the first sugar rush might fade fast.

Triple-witching expiration loses its punch as volatility stays low

Friday’s triple-witching expiration isn’t getting the hype it used to. Traders once feared the collision of expiring stock options, index futures, and ETF contracts. That totaled $5 trillion in quarterly expiry this time, but Garrett said the effect has been fading.

“The quarterly option expiry is increasingly becoming a non-event especially when volatility is low,” Garrett said. And volatility is definitely low.

Historical data over the last 35 years shows that S&P 500 intraday moves during expiry weeks are only slightly higher than the following weeks. That puts a dent in the “free to move” theory, where dealers’ positions roll off and remove their usual stabilizing trades.

That theory, that dealers buy dips and sell rallies to balance their books, and that their exit lets prices swing, isn’t showing up when volatility’s crushed, Garrett said. So traders shouldn’t expect Monday to be wild. It might feel like any other quiet week, despite the size of the contracts rolling off.

Meanwhile, the broader equity market is ignoring the noise and pushing higher. The Nasdaq broke 22,000 this week, clocking in its fifth straight record close. The S&P 500 crossed another milestone, pushing beyond 4,600, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record too; 46,000, its highest level ever.

Even with signs of economic stress, tech stocks are still moving markets. Oracle’s AI backlog numbers stunned traders, and strategists like Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi from UBS say the AI rally isn’t slowing down.

“With robust tech earnings momentum and imminent Fed rate cuts ahead, we do not see elevated valuations as a reason to shy away from diversified exposure to the sector,” Ulrike said.

She added that UBS sees the S&P 500 hitting 6,600 by the end of 2025, and 6,800 by mid-2026. That’s the most bullish call from UBS so far this year, even with rising rate-cut bets and a weakening labor market.

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