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Trading Around Option Expiration Days

Steve LeCompte | | Posted in: Calendar Effects, Equity Options

Are there anomalies for U.S. stock market returns around equity option expiration (OE) days (normally the third Friday of each month, but the preceding Thursday when the market is closed on the third Friday)? To investigate, we examine close-to-close S&P 500 Index returns from five trading days before through five trading days after a moderately large sample of OE days. Using daily closing prices for the index during January 1990 through February 2022 (386 OE days), we find that:

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