Quad Witching Tracker Excel: June 2026 Options Expiration Dashboard

Quad witching tracker excel templates are how serious options traders prepare for the four most volatile Fridays of the year. The next one lands on Friday, June 20, 2026, when stock options, stock index options, stock index futures, and single-stock futures all expire in the same session. Dealers rebalance enormous gamma books, max pain magnets pull spot toward dense open-interest strikes, and intraday ranges in the most heavily-traded names can run two to three times their normal width. This guide ships a free Excel template that pulls live max pain, put/call ratios, implied-volatility rank, and risk-sized strategy setups across the 12 names that drive most of the quad witching flow.

Download the templates:

• - Pre-filled with positioning data as of June 6, 2026
• - Live-updating formulas for any expiration date

What the June 2026 Quad Witching Setup Looks Like

The June 20, 2026 expiration sits in a uniquely busy two-week window. The FOMC June meeting falls on the 17th, the Russell index reconstitution lands on the same Friday as quad witching, and the post-WWDC AI re-rating in Apple is still in progress. That cluster of catalysts is exactly what makes quad witching weeks tradeable: a base level of structural flow (dealer hedging into OI walls) layered on top of fresh fundamental catalysts.

The table below summarizes the watchlist as of June 6, 2026, two weeks before expiry. These 12 names cover the bulk of quad witching open interest in single-stock and index option markets.

Three things jump out. SPY is sitting on top of a heavy put-skewed OI structure that is classic for an index quad: dealers are short downside puts, long underlying, and that positioning typically presses the tape upward into the close on expiration day. NVDA and TSLA have the highest IV ranks in the watchlist, which makes them prime candidates for premium-selling setups if you have stomach for the gap risk. And IWM has the heaviest put/call OI ratio of the index ETFs at 1.35, signaling that small-cap hedging is currently the highest-conviction macro trade on Wall Street.

What Quad Witching Actually Is, Mechanically

Quad witching is named for four products that share one expiration: index futures, single-stock futures, index options, and equity options. The result is the largest single-day options-driven volume of every quarter. The third Friday of March, June, September, and December are the four dates each year. In recent years, single-stock futures have become a smaller part of the volume mix in the US, so traders occasionally call it triple witching, but the dealer-rebalancing dynamics are identical.

The mechanic that matters for traders is the size of the dealer book. Market makers run delta-neutral books, which means they hedge every option they write or buy with offsetting stock. As price approaches each open-interest cluster, dealer gamma changes sign, and the size of the hedge they must do flips, often violently. Quad witching is the one day a quarter where so many options expire that the post-bell open interest essentially resets to zero. The hedges those dealers carried for the prior month all have to come off, which produces the massive closing-auction volume that quad witching is known for.

Three forces drive the price action into a quad expiration:

The max pain magnet. Max pain is the strike price where total dollar losses for option buyers (both calls and puts) are maximized at expiration. Because dealer P&L is broadly the inverse of buyer P&L, max pain doubles as the strike that minimizes dealer payout. In heavy single-name flow with concentrated OI, price tends to drift toward max pain into the close, often inside the last hour. It is not gravity, but it is a measurable bias.

The gamma wall. If 80% of the OI in NVDA for June 20 sits between the $150 and $155 strikes, that creates a "wall" where dealer gamma is maximally positive. Negative-gamma dealer positions amplify moves (sell low, buy high to stay hedged); positive-gamma dealer positions dampen them (buy low, sell high). When the tape pushes through a gamma wall in either direction, intraday volatility tends to explode.

The pin trade. When a single strike has overwhelming OI, the combined hedging activity of dealers can effectively "pin" the underlying to that strike. Pin trades historically work in liquid mega-caps when the underlying is within 0.5% of the strike two hours before close. They fail spectacularly when a fundamental headline overrides positioning.

Reading the Tape With a Quad Witching Tracker Excel Template

The template ships with seven sheets. Each sheet has its own "MarketXLS Functions Used" reference box at the bottom so you can rebuild it in your own workbook if you want to.

Sheet 1: Main Dashboard

The dashboard is your top-of-funnel view. Three yellow input cells let you set your portfolio size, your max risk per trade, and a minimum IV rank threshold. The watchlist table below pulls last price, beta, 30-day implied volatility, IV rank, 20-day realized volatility, put/call volume ratio, put/call OI ratio, max pain strike, and a calculated "pin distance" (how far the max pain strike sits from current spot).

The pin-distance column is the most useful single metric on the sheet. When it is close to zero, the stock is sitting on top of its dealer-positioning sweet spot, which is the highest-probability pin trade. When it is large in absolute terms, the underlying has to travel meaningful distance before quad-witching dynamics activate, which usually means the broader macro tape is going to dominate positioning that week.

Real formulas behind the dashboard:

=QM_Last("SPY")
=Beta("AAPL")
=IMPLIEDVOLATILITY30D("AAPL", TODAY())*100
=IMPLIEDVOLATILITYRANK1M("AAPL", TODAY())
=TwentyDayVolatility("AAPL")*100
=OPT_PutCallVolRatio("AAPL", "2026-06-20")
=OPT_PutCallOIRatio("AAPL", "2026-06-20")
=OPT_MaxPain("AAPL", "2026-06-20")
=Sector("AAPL")

Sheet 2: Open Interest Heatmap

The OI Heatmap breaks each ticker into call OI, put OI, total OI for the June 20 expiry, put/call OI ratio, put/call volume ratio, total notional OI in dollars, and a categorical skew label. A diverging color scale highlights put-heavy names in red, call-heavy in green, and balanced in yellow.

The notional OI column is where this gets practical. SPY June 20 currently shows roughly $283 million of notional open interest. That number is the amount of underlying value that dealers are managing exposure on into the close. When you compare it to single names like NFLX (around $14 million notional), it is clear why index expirations dominate the close-of-day price action: the dealer hedge into and out of SPY positions is roughly 20 times larger than the hedge into a single mega-cap name.

=OPT_TotalOpenInterestOptions("SPY", "Call", "2026-06-20", "")
=OPT_TotalOpenInterestOptions("SPY", "Put", "2026-06-20", "")
=OPT_PutCallOIRatio("SPY", "2026-06-20")
=OPT_PutCallVolRatio("SPY", "2026-06-20")

Sheet 3: Strategy Setup

Three pre-built strategies, each with the full entry, exit, max risk, and target-greek configuration:

Pin-the-strike iron condor. Sell a tight strangle around max pain, buy a wider strangle as protection. This is the canonical premium-seller trade for quad witching weeks in liquid index ETFs. The thesis is that dealer gamma will magnetize the underlying toward max pain into the close, letting you decay the short strikes toward zero. Exit at 50% of max profit, or close it out on Thursday afternoon if the underlying drifts more than 0.5% from max pain.

Gamma scalp straddle. Buy an ATM call and an ATM put on a high-IV-rank name like TSLA or NVDA where positioning is roughly symmetric (P/C OI between 0.85 and 1.15). Quad witching can produce outsized intraday moves when no single strike anchors the tape, so the straddle becomes a vehicle to harvest gamma via underlying scalps. Exit when you have collected 30% above your premium, or by Thursday afternoon.

Skew-fade vertical. When a name's put/call OI ratio gets extreme (above 1.30 for an index ETF), put-buying is overwhelming call-buying. Dealers who wrote those puts are short downside, which means as the underlying moves toward the short put strikes they have to buy stock to hedge. That tilts the tape upward. The skew-fade vertical takes the other side of the heavy put positioning with a long ATM call paid for by a short slightly-OTM call.

The strategy sheet uses MarketXLS option helper functions:

=STRIKENEXT("SPY", 0, "2026-06-20")
=OPT_Delta(optionSymbol)
=OPT_Gamma(optionSymbol)
=OPT_Theta(optionSymbol)
=OPT_Vega(optionSymbol)
=OPT_ImpliedVolatility(optionSymbol)

Sheet 4: Position Sizing

The Position Sizing sheet does the math that most discretionary traders skip. You set portfolio size and max-risk-per-trade percentage on the Main Dashboard, and this sheet calculates the max number of iron condor lots, straddle lots, and vertical lots you can carry per ticker before crossing your loss limit. It assumes a $5 iron-condor wing width ($500 max loss per contract), a debit straddle priced at roughly 5% of notional, and a $3-wide vertical spread ($300 max loss per contract).

Lot caps land where they should. For a $250,000 portfolio with a 2% max risk per trade ($5,000), the sheet sizes 10 iron condor contracts in SPY, but only 1 straddle contract in TSLA at $312 underlying. The position-size math is exactly what makes quad-witching trades survivable through the inevitable losers.

Sheet 5: Volatility Matrix

The Volatility Matrix is the most analytical sheet in the workbook. Six columns per ticker: 30-day IV, IV rank, 20-day realized vol (HV), the IV-minus-HV spread (a vol-risk premium proxy), put/call OI ratio, and a composite "Sell Vol Score" that combines IV rank with the IV-HV spread.

The Sell Vol Score formula is simple:

=IMPLIEDVOLATILITYRANK1M("NVDA", TODAY()) + (IMPLIEDVOLATILITY30D("NVDA", TODAY())*100 - TwentyDayVolatility("NVDA")*100)*2

The higher the score, the more attractive a name looks for credit spreads, iron condors, and other negative-vega setups. NVDA at IV rank 68 with IV30 sitting 4.8 points above realized scores in the high 70s, which puts it at the top of the premium-selling watchlist for the June 20 expiry.

Sheet 6: Quad Witching Calendar

A simple but useful sheet: upcoming quad witching dates through 2027, historical average S&P 500 behavior in the week before, day of, and week after a quad expiration, and a day-by-day pre-expiration checklist tied to the June 20 event. Two patterns worth noting from the historical data: the week before quad has been positive 56% of the time (small but meaningful), and the week after has been negative 56% of the time (the post-expiry hangover effect).

How to Read Put/Call Ratios Around a Quad Expiry

The put/call open interest ratio is the single most useful positioning indicator for quad witching, and most retail traders read it backward. A high put/call OI ratio is not bearish for price; it is bullish for price, at least into the expiration.

The reason is dealer mechanics. When the put/call OI ratio is well above 1.0, it means options buyers (mostly hedgers) have purchased more puts than calls. The other side of those trades sits on dealer balance sheets as short puts, which is equivalent to being long the underlying. To stay delta-neutral, dealers must short underlying stock against those positions. As the underlying drops toward the short put strikes, dealer gamma flips and they have to buy stock back to flatten. This is the mechanic that produces the "buy the dip" feel of high-put-OI markets.

The opposite logic applies to low put/call OI. When the ratio drops below 0.80, calls dominate the OI, dealers are short calls (effectively short underlying), and they buy stock back into rallies. That can drive blow-off tops, but it can also produce sharp selloffs once price moves past peak call OI and dealer gamma collapses.

For the June 20 expiry, IWM at 1.35 P/C OI is the cleanest setup for "buy the dip if it dips" positioning. SPY at 1.42 is similar. NVDA at 0.71 is closer to the call-heavy end and would behave differently: more upside acceleration on a positive surprise, but also more downside if Friday opens weak.

A Note on Max Pain (And Its Limits)

Max pain is calculated by computing, for every possible underlying close at expiration, the total dollar loss for option buyers across all strikes and series. The strike that minimizes total buyer P&L (and therefore maximizes dealer P&L) is the max pain strike. The MarketXLS implementation is one cell:

=OPT_MaxPain("AAPL", "2026-06-20")

Max pain is a positioning snapshot, not a forecast. It works best when three conditions are met: liquidity is high (mega-cap or major index ETF), there are no scheduled fundamental events on or before expiration day, and the underlying is already within 1% of the max pain strike going into the final week. When any of those conditions break (especially the fundamental-event one), max pain becomes noise.

A practical rule for the June 20 expiry: on Wednesday afternoon, calculate max pain. If it has not migrated more than 1% from where it sat on Monday, the pin trade is alive. If it has shifted meaningfully, dealer flows are getting absorbed by fundamental flow and you should respect that signal.

Building Your Own Quad Witching Watchlist

The default watchlist in the template covers SPY, QQQ, IWM, AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, TSLA, AMZN, META, GOOGL, AMD, and NFLX, which represents most of the volume traded on a typical quad witching Friday. If you want to extend it, the criteria worth applying are:

1. Minimum option open interest. A name needs at least 50,000 total contracts of OI on the target expiry to be worth tracking. Below that, dealer flow is too small to move the underlying.
2. Minimum average daily volume. Use =AverageDailyVolume(ticker) and screen for at least 5 million shares per day. Thin stocks produce wild moves that have nothing to do with positioning.
3. Liquid options chain. Bid-ask spreads on the front-month options matter. Spread = (Ask - Bid) / Mid. Anything wider than 5% is a red flag, regardless of nominal OI.
4. Single-name catalyst calendar. Use =ExpectedEarningsDate(ticker) to make sure there is no earnings event between today and quad witching. Earnings completely override positioning.

A clean addition for the June 2026 expiry would be the semiconductor index ETF SMH (heavy NVDA correlation), the regional banking ETF KRE (Russell-reconstitution-adjacent), and the homebuilder ETF XHB (interest-rate sensitive going into the FOMC).

Risk Management for Quad Witching Weeks

Quad witching weeks are not a buy-and-hold environment. They are a structural-flow trading environment, which means the rules of risk management need to match the holding period.

Hard stop on Thursday afternoon. Most quad-witching trades expect to be closed by Thursday close, with maybe a small residual position held into Friday morning. Anything carrying significant delta into the Friday close is essentially a guess about the closing auction print, which is one of the noisiest data points in the entire trading year.

Position size to weekly portfolio risk, not annual. If you risk 2% per trade on a normal week, cut that to 1% on quad-witching weeks. The reason is correlation: when multiple positioning trades trigger on the same Wednesday-Thursday window, they tend to lose money together, not independently. Cutting per-trade size also caps your portfolio-wide drawdown.

No pyramiding into pins. Pin trades are highest-probability when entered Thursday afternoon and exited Friday before 3pm ET. Adding to a winning pin trade on Friday morning is the classic way to give back the entire week's edge in a single bad print.

Watch the macro calendar. The June 17 FOMC and the June 20 Russell reconstitution are both in this window. If either produces an off-script surprise (a hawkish FOMC, a heavily-shorted Russell rebalance), quad-witching dynamics get overridden. Have a kill-switch rule for each.

How to Customize the Template for the Next Quad Witching

The template is built around a single date string in one cell, the "Quad Witching Date" input on the Main Dashboard. To roll it forward to the September 19, 2026 expiry, change that single cell from "2026-06-20" to "2026-09-19", and the OI, max pain, P/C ratios, and notional calculations across all sheets refresh automatically.

The watchlist itself is harder to refresh because liquidity shifts. Through 2025 and 2026, the 12-name list above has been remarkably stable, with the only meaningful change being NVDA moving from "single-name with index influence" to "index-defining single name" after its 10-for-1 split. For 2027 expirations, watch whether any of the AI-second-derivative names (broadly: SMCI, ARM, AVGO) push their option OI into territory that warrants a watchlist seat.

FAQ: Quad Witching Tracker Excel

What is quad witching and why does it matter for options traders? Quad witching is the simultaneous expiration of stock options, stock index options, stock index futures, and single-stock futures on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December. It matters because it is the single largest options-related volume day of the quarter. Dealer hedging activity into and out of the expiration produces measurable price patterns (max pain magnets, gamma walls, pin trades) that can be analyzed with the right Excel tools.

When is the June 2026 quad witching expiration? Friday, June 20, 2026. The most active hours are typically 9:30 to 10:00 am ET (overnight position unwinds) and 3:30 to 4:00 pm ET (closing-auction rebalance).

Which MarketXLS formula gives me the max pain strike? =OPT_MaxPain("AAPL", "2026-06-20") returns the max pain strike for AAPL options expiring June 20, 2026. The function pulls live open interest data across the full chain and runs the standard max pain calculation, so you do not have to download chains and compute it manually.

How do I read the put/call OI ratio for quad witching? A ratio above 1.10 typically means dealers are short downside (long underlying) and will lean the tape upward into the close. A ratio below 0.85 typically means dealers are short calls (effectively short underlying) and will defend against rallies. Between 0.85 and 1.10, positioning is roughly balanced and macro flows usually dominate.

Is IV rank or 30-day IV more useful for quad witching strategy selection? IV rank is more useful. IV rank tells you where current implied volatility sits relative to its own one-month history (0 to 100 percentile). A 30-day IV reading of 25% means very different things for a low-vol name like KO and a high-vol name like TSLA. IV rank normalizes the comparison.

Can the template be used for non-quad expirations like monthly opex? Yes. Change the "Quad Witching Date" input cell to any monthly expiration (third Friday of any month) and the template will pull positioning, IV, and max pain for that date. The dealer-flow patterns are smaller in monthly opex than in quad witching, but they still exist for liquid names.

Do I need MarketXLS Pro to use the live formulas? The template requires the MarketXLS Excel add-in with options data access. Specific subscription requirements depend on the tier and the formulas you use. The static sample file is fully usable without any add-in. For current package details, see marketxls.com/pricing.

The Bottom Line

Quad witching tracker excel templates are not about predicting Friday's close. They are about reading the positioning the market has already built up into the expiration and trading the structural patterns that arise from that positioning. The June 20, 2026 setup features a put-heavy SPY (typical for an index quad), elevated single-name IV rank in NVDA and TSLA (good for premium sellers), and a uniquely busy macro window with FOMC on the 17th and Russell reconstitution on the 20th itself.

The template ships with seven sheets, three pre-built strategies, full position sizing, and a live volatility matrix that combines IV rank with realized-vol comparisons. Download both files above and point the formulas at your own watchlist.

If you want the MarketXLS Excel add-in that powers the live version, start at marketxls.com or book a walkthrough demo where we will show you how to wire option flow into your own trading workbook.

Educational content only. Not investment advice. Option strategies carry the risk of partial or total loss of capital. Past performance of quad witching patterns does not guarantee future results.