There’s an invisible force driving the most popular options trade of the year — one that gives Wall Street pros and day traders alike the power to turn a $1 investment into a $1,000 stock bet.
All week, stock traders have shrugged off everything from hot inflation data in the US to another recession-threatening hike in interest rates over in Europe.
This year’s hottest options trade has found its way into the $7.4 trillion ETF arena for the first time, in the latest push by the financial industry to tap booming demand for stock investments with an income stream.
Day traders are far more active in the booming world of zero-day stock options than Wall Street realizes, according to the exchange at the center of the frenzy.
The heated debate on the threat posed by the boom in stock derivatives that expire within 24 hours is pitting two of Wall Street’s biggest banks against each other.
The fresh boom in stock options that expire within 24 hours has grabbed all the attention on Wall Street trading desks — spurring a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warning that the activity is fueling the recent market selloff.
Look closely at the contours of Tuesday’s tumble in the S&P 500 and fingerprints of a new market force come into focus.
The craze for fast-expiring options is ramping to unprecedented heights in a stock market that has lately been given to severe intraday moves. It’s probably not a coincidence.
All of a sudden, the short-volatility trade is back on Wall Street as billions of dollars pour into options-selling ETFs like never before.
Of all the signs out there that the US will manage to dodge a recession once deemed inevitable, perhaps none is more convincing than this: CEOs across the country are opting to reinvest more of their profits in expansion projects rather than handing the money back to shareholders.
While US stocks may pull back in coming weeks amid concern over Federal Reserve policy, the S&P 500 will reassert itself around September before climbing to an all-time high, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s trading desk.
For stock-picking hedge funds coping with 2023’s loopy markets, risks are starting to outweigh the rewards.
To stand a chance of winning in this market, stock pickers need big tech exposure. Not all of them can get it.
The likeliest outcome of Wednesday’s Federal Reserve announcement is also one that is apt to lift stocks, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s trading desk says.
Last year’s plunge in the S&P 500 made uber bear Mike Wilson the most celebrated stock forecaster on Wall Street. It’s a role he has failed to reprise in 2023.
It made sense at the time. Jerome Powell was waging war on inflation. The bond market was flashing dire warnings. Practically everyone saw a recession coming.
An out-of-cycle rebalance in the Nasdaq 100 is adding another layer of wrinkles to stock trading with a flood of options expiring Friday.
When a “special rebalance” of the Nasdaq 100 Index was touched off to curb the dominance of the biggest technology stocks, Meta Platforms Inc. was the only mega-cap to fall below a crucial threshold for downsizing. Now it seems the social media giant will be pared back anyway.
With the S&P 500 up 25% in nine months and sitting at its best level since April 2022, people want to know: is an all-time high next? John Flood, a partner at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., thinks so.
America’s biggest tech companies have become too large even for the stock index tracking America’s biggest tech companies.
For people looking on anxiously as stock wealth converges in an oligarchy of high-tech juggernauts, some perspective: It’s nothing new.
The gravity-defying bull market is handing stock investors a fresh conundrum as an unusually big pile of options expires Friday: Chase gains via bullish derivatives or hedge with bearish bets?
Turns out not even hawkish saber-rattling by the Federal Reserve is enough to awaken stock investors from the spell cast on them by artificial intelligence.
Big money managers are slashing bearish wagers and boosting equity exposure ahead of a week of potentially market-moving news.
The once-hot Wall Street trades of 2023 are all falling apart, in a fresh blow to market pros blindsided again and again ever since the pandemic broke out.
As fast as it went up for value managers, it’s coming down. The culprit is the all-consuming craze for artificial intelligence.
Stock investors who planned for one thing in 2023 are getting something else entirely. Now, with the tech-obsessed market at risk of running away from them, the race is on to catch up.
An end-of-week feeding frenzy in options of the world’s biggest companies has emerged as two of the hottest trends on Wall Street collide.
Some previously steadfast bears are showing signs of giving in after a seven-month advance put the S&P 500 on the edge of a key chart line.
Investor indifference to the threat of a prolonged debt-ceiling impasse has left a handful of tail-risk strategies almost too cheap to pass up.
Corporate America, one of the few reliable purchasers of equities in this bear market, is retreating from its buying binge, fresh evidence that the Federal Reserve-induced slowdown is taking a toll on business sentiment.
In a market where conflicting views abound, two major Wall Street trading desks agree on one thing: US stocks will rally on any soft inflation print Wednesday that could pave the way for the Federal Reserve to halt its tightening campaign.
As Wall Street economists and central bankers debate if and when the US economy will slip into a recession, big money managers aren’t waiting to find out.
About a month ago, as Wall Street stared down the barrel of an incipient banking crisis, the investment world’s most-watched gauge of market volatility did a funny thing: It didn’t do much.
The surprisingly resilient equity market is invigorating a time-honored options strategy, driving it to the best start of a year in two decades.
Hedge funds are reloading on bearish wagers on US equities, betting the latest market retreat will persist amid worsening economic data and corporate earnings.
Professional stock pickers who feasted on last year’s volatility were positioned for more of the same heading into 2023. They got something else entirely, and are paying for it in their returns.
A question has arisen amid all the bank failures. How, with the bond market enduring its worst spasm of volatility in almost four decades, have benchmark-level stocks managed to glide along, oases of calm?
It’s a time-honored tale. A new force enters the market — quantitative easing, leveraged ETFs, high-frequency trading — and a cottage industry on Wall Street is born devoted to exposing the risks it supposedly poses for investors.
In telling their stories about how the future is bright for stocks, bulls point to solid earnings to justify the optimism. But cracks are forming in that narrative — in the trajectory of profits, and just as worryingly in the makeup of the profits themselves.
Professional speculators aren’t convinced that the worst is over for one risky corner of the stock market despite a rousing new-year rally.
A week after JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Marko Kolanovic issued a “Volmageddon 2.0” warning on the explosive rise in short-dated options, Bank of America Corp. strategists are pushing back.
Passively managed equity funds are on the cusp of marking a milestone that’s been more than a decade in the making: Globally, net assets in such products are about to exceed those of their actively managed counterparts, according to Societe Generale.
Professional speculators are turning risk-on by gobbling up technology shares, after largely missing out on the new-year rally in the stock-market’s biggest winners.
Quick: how did equity traders feel about inflation after Tuesday’s consumer price index hit? Depends on when you asked.
For months now, an uneasy truce has prevailed between the Federal Reserve and stock investors.
Just weeks after professional stock pickers celebrated their best year since 2017, the wind in the stock market has shifted, upending their fate.
Despite enduring a brutal start to the year for their portfolios thanks to a surprise market rally, two top-ranked fund managers are sticking to the bearish views that made them winners in the 2022 stock crash.
One of many things to break in last year’s market rout was a decade-long stretch in which gains in stocks overwhelmed gains in wages.
Behind closed doors, Federal Reserve policy makers worry rallying markets are impeding their efforts to control inflation. But every time Jerome Powell goes out in public he gives them more room to run.
