Monthly Options Expiration on NQ: Pinning, Gamma Roll-Off and the Week After

Monthly options expiration, opex for short, falls on the third Friday of every month: October 16 and November 20 in 2026, then December 18, when the quarterly NQ future settles as well. NQ futures only expire four times a year, but options on the Nasdaq-100 index, on QQQ and on the index's largest stocks expire every month, and the hedging around them can show up on an NQ chart in the days before and after.

If futures basics are new, NQ vs MNQ tick and point value is the place to start. This post builds on gamma exposure on NQ, which explains why dealers' option books turn into buying and selling in the index.

Two expirations on one Friday

A monthly opex therefore has a morning event and an afternoon one. The standard index options stop trading on Thursday and settle to a value built from Friday's opening prints, so the opening prints of the index stocks set the payout on every one of those contracts. The afternoon event covers the options that settle on closing prices or into shares.

In October and November the NQ future itself trades straight through both. The CME option that expires that Friday is a European-style weekly option on the December future, and it stops at 3:00 PM CT, 4:00 PM ET. December 18 adds the future's own settlement at the open; cash settlement and quarterly expiration on NQ covers that day.

The autumn clock changes don't move these times for a trader in Europe. On October 16 and on November 20 New York is six hours behind Central Europe, so 15:30 and 22:00 hold for both dates.

Pinning

Pinning is the tendency of a price to finish close to a strike with large open interest on expiration day. The usual explanation is dealer hedging. A dealer who is long options around a big strike is long gamma, which means the hedge requires selling as price rises above the strike and buying as it falls below. That trading leans against the move and pulls price back toward the strike. When dealers are short those options, the same arithmetic pushes price away from the strike instead.

The effect has been measured. Ni, Pearson and Poteshman (2005) found that closing prices of optionable US stocks cluster at strike prices on expiration Fridays, and traced it to delta-hedge rebalancing and to stock trades by proprietary traders that moved prices in favor of their own option positions. Golez and Jackwerth (2012) found S&P 500 futures drawn toward the at-the-money strike on expiration days of the serial (non-quarterly) options on those futures.

The research gives no trading rule. A pin is visible in a closing price after the fact. During the day there are several large strikes, the position that matters is the dealers' net exposure, which isn't public, and a news-driven move overruns hedging flows easily. Gamma models estimate the positioning from open interest; gamma levels on NQ shows how to read them and why they stay estimates.

Gamma roll-off

Once options expire, the hedges tied to them are no longer needed, and the gamma attached to those strikes drops out of the dealers' books. If a large long-gamma position had been damping moves in the days before expiration, the market can trade more freely afterward. If dealers had been short gamma, expiration removes something that was amplifying moves. Which of the two applies on a given Friday depends on positioning you can only estimate, so the safe statement is that the profile changes after opex, with no direction attached.

Daily expirations have shrunk the effect of any single date. Options expiring the same day they trade, known as 0DTE, made up a record 66.2% of SPX option volume in July 2026, according to Cboe. Gamma that used to build into the monthly date now rolls off every session. What the monthly date still has is open interest built up over weeks or months, expiring at once.

The week after

A common claim is that the week after monthly opex tends to be weak for stocks, as the gamma that held the market in place disappears. I haven't found a published study that tests it on Nasdaq-100 futures with a stated method and sample, so it doesn't belong in a plan as a fact. The nearest published test is on stocks: Stivers and Sun (2013) found that S&P 100 stocks tended to return more in the third-Friday week and modestly underperformed in the week after it. A broader measured effect is intraday: Baltussen, Da, Lammers and Martens (2021) documented intraday momentum into the last 30 minutes of trading across more than 60 futures markets from 1974 to 2020, reverting over the following days, and linked it to hedging of short-gamma positions. It describes intraday flows in general and says nothing specific about opex weeks.

Trading an opex Friday

Traders handle the day in a few ways. Some trade it like any other Friday and only note on the calendar that the 9:30 AM ET open carries the morning settlement, with heavier opening volume in the index stocks. Some stay out of the first minutes after the open, when the opening auction sets the settlement value and prints can jump. Some watch the largest strikes into the afternoon for a pin, treating it as a hypothesis with a clear point where it is wrong, such as a break and hold beyond the strike.

My trading window closes around the US cash open, so on an opex Friday the morning settlement happens after I've finished, and the date goes on the calendar as one more reason not to hold anything into 15:30 European time.