S&P 500 Bounces On Quad Witching day

US stock markets have maintained uneven performance on the final trading day of the week as traders still busy digesting this week’s Fed’s hawkish signals pivot and a continued rise in global Omicron Covid-19 variant infections.

The S&P 500 was last down 0.1%, though it bounced from earlier session lows in the 4600 area after finding support at prior weekly lows and recently managed to recover back above the 4650 level.

The Dow was down about 0.8%, though also mustered a modest recovery from earlier session lows in the 35.2K area to back above 35.5K, which means it still trades about 1.5% below Thursday’s highs at 36.2K.

Weakness in yields has helped the growth/duration-sensitive Nasdaq 100 outperform, with the index actually now up about 0.4% on the day, having reversed from earlier session losses of as much as 1.3%. A rise in long-term government bond yields is a proxy for this. Elsewhere, the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index was up half a point to the 21.00 area.

Trading conditions were also unpredictable and choppy on Friday, and are likely to remain like this for the remainder of the session, given that Friday was “quad witching” day.

This is the simultaneous expiration of stock options, stock index futures and index options contracts, which happens once per quarter.