Forex options expiries are coming to a head as the year rolls off

Here are the forex option expiries for the 10 am (15.00 GMT) New York cut 15 December 2017

We’re into that time of year where the last hedges and positions start to close out. We’ve got a lot of big expiries today and with liquidity falling, they could well contain prices throughout the day. USDJPY has a load around 112.00/30, as does EURUSD around 1.1800/50. We can see a lot of the hedges going off with some big out the money options going off in EURGBP and EURJPY. I’ve mainly noted them because of their size and just to show what’s happening in the bigger picture.

What I’ve also seen is that there’s a lot of size GBP options going off next week. For example, on Monday, we have 1.79bn @1.3350, 2.08bn @1.3550 & 1.24bn @1.3600/02. There’s also a couple in GBPJPY, 727m @150.50 & 769m @ 153.60. These are probably some of the 10bn of short-term options that were put on when the first headlines of the phase one Brexit deal being agreeed came out.

Here’s today’s board.