$5.7 trillion expires today. Not in the morning. At the close.

$5.7 trillion expires today. Not at the open.

Not a typo. $5.7 trillion in options contracts clear today. Roughly $2 trillion hit at the morning open when the SPX AM settlement fired, and the rest rolls off at today's close.

Most traders spent the morning watching oil prices and reading headlines about Iran.

Here is what was actually running the tape.

When options expire, the firms that sold those contracts have to constantly adjust their stock positions to stay hedged. Those firms are called market makers. 

They are the ones on the other side of every options trade you place.

They do not take directional bets. They stay neutral. 

And staying neutral means constantly buying and selling stock as the market moves.

Here is why today was different from any normal expiration. Delta is how fast an option's price moves for every dollar the stock moves. Gamma is how fast that speed changes.

On any normal day, gamma is manageable. On a quarterly expiration like today, gamma goes through the roof.

A 50 delta option can flip to a 65 delta with a single dollar move in the underlying. That means market makers have to buy and sell stock to stay neutral. Not dozens of times. Millions of times every tick.

The stock volume today was not traders reacting to news. It was market makers rehedging.

Tesla hit three sixty-eight this morning. Not because of a headline. Because the expected move had that level marked before the week started.

I have been saying this for nearly thirty years. The expected move tells you the range. 

The news tells you the story people are telling themselves about why the range happened.

These are not the same thing.

Today is one of the biggest OpEx days on record. The market is moving because $5.7 trillion in options are expiring and the firms that wrote them have to rehedge every tick all day long.

Not the Fed. Not Iran. Mechanics.

Don't think. Just go look what's the expected move.

That is the whole game. Everything else is noise.

Last night’s Superfly session walks through exactly how to trade around these mechanics, how to read the expected move before the open, and how to use expiration-day gamma to your advantage instead of getting run over by it.

You can catch the replay here. 

Don Kaufman

P.S. The expected move had $368 as Tesla's lower range for this week. Tesla hit it at the open. Expected move, not prediction. We took profits this morning, you can see how we put on the trade yesterday here.