Wall Street Faces a $5.7 Trillion Triple-Witching Jolt on Friday

Wall Street equities traders are bracing for an unusually large tally of options expiring on Friday, which risks injecting even more volatility into a market that’s seen weeks of turbulence amid the raging Mideast conflict.

Roughly $5.7 trillion in notional options tied to individual US stocks, indexes and exchange-traded funds are set to expire on Friday in the quarterly event that traders have dubbed the “triple-witching” — the largest March expiry in Citigroup Inc. data going back to 1996. That figure includes $4.1 trillion in index contracts, $772 billion in exchange-traded funds and $875 billion in single-stock options.