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Every quarterly witching session since September 2024: market-wide share volume vs. the month's other sessions

Answered against 22 years of US equities and 12 years of US options data and published with the query that produced it. This result is stored as of 2026-08-10, from What Is Triple Witching? Volume & Volatility.

as of series 8×5read in context →
Every quarterly witching session since September 2024: market-wide share volume vs. the month's other sessions — 8 rows by 5 columns, computed from US exchange, SIP and OPRA data.
witching_sessionwitching_shares_bother_days_median_btimes_mediangap_to_next_heaviest
2024-09-2013.610.11.341.97
2024-12-2016.113.11.23-1.37
2025-03-2113.914.30.97-4.03
2025-06-2016.215.81.02-7.24
2025-09-1920.216.71.211.37
2025-12-191814.51.241.15
2026-03-2019.918.91.05-3.14
2026-06-1826.720.11.331.15
Rows × columns
8 × 5
Period covered
to
Computed
Completeness
No missing values
Source
US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data
Licence
Strasmore terms · free, no signup
Formats
JSON · CSV · the SQL below

What each column holds

Column definitions for Every quarterly witching session since September 2024: market-wide share volume vs. the month's other sessions, derived from the stored result.
ColumnTypeRangeNotes
witching_session date 2024-09-20 to 2026-06-18
witching_shares_b number 13.6 to 26.7 count
other_days_median_b number 10.1 to 20.1
times_median number 0.97 to 1.34
gap_to_next_heaviest number -7.24 to 1.97

Computed from Strasmore's warehouse of US exchange, SIP and OPRA market data. Equity prices are delayed; options greeks and implied volatility are end-of-day. This result is stored, not recomputed on load — it is exactly the numbers that were returned on , and the query below is what returned them.

the exact SQL behind every number
WITH daily AS (
    SELECT toDate(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York')) AS day,
           sum(toFloat64(volume)) / 1e9 AS shares_b
    FROM global_markets.delayed_stocks_minute_aggs
    WHERE window_start >= '2024-09-01 04:00:00'
      AND window_start < '2026-07-01 04:00:00'
      AND toMonth(toTimeZone(window_start, 'America/New_York')) IN (3, 6, 9, 12)
    GROUP BY day
),
witching AS (
    SELECT toStartOfMonth(day) AS m,
           maxIf(day, day <= addDays(toStartOfMonth(day),
                 ((5 - toDayOfWeek(toStartOfMonth(day)) + 7) % 7) + 14)) AS witching_day
    FROM daily
    GROUP BY m
)
SELECT toString(w.witching_day) AS witching_session,
       round(anyIf(d.shares_b, d.day = w.witching_day), 1) AS witching_shares_b,
       round(quantileDeterministicIf(0.5)(d.shares_b, cityHash64(toString(d.day)), d.day != w.witching_day), 1) AS other_days_median_b,
       round(anyIf(d.shares_b, d.day = w.witching_day)
             / quantileDeterministicIf(0.5)(d.shares_b, cityHash64(toString(d.day)), d.day != w.witching_day), 2) AS times_median,
       round(anyIf(d.shares_b, d.day = w.witching_day) - maxIf(d.shares_b, d.day != w.witching_day), 2) AS gap_to_next_heaviest
FROM daily AS d
INNER JOIN witching AS w ON toStartOfMonth(d.day) = w.m
GROUP BY w.witching_day
HAVING countIf(d.day != w.witching_day) > 0
ORDER BY w.witching_day

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