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Quadruple witching days are the four days in the calendar year, when stock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single stock futures all expire simultaneously.

• Stock index futures are contracts to buy or sell at a set price today, to be settled at a date in the future.
• Stock index options give the right to trade a specific stock index at a specified price by a specified expiration date.
• Stock options gives the right purchase stock in a company at a determined price within a certain window of time.
• Single stock futures are contract to exchange a specified number of stocks in a company at a price agreed today (the strike price) with delivery at a specified delivery date.

Quadruple witching days are the third Friday of March, June, September, and December.

Quartz news this morning (17 March 2022) says this:

The day is known for heavy trading volume and there can be a great deal of unpredictability in the market because “hedges are no longer needed or are adjusted for new positions,” said George Pearkes, an investment analyst at Bespoke Investment Group.
With Russia’s invasion in Ukraine creating new economic pains and a quarter percentage rate hike from the Fed, this Witching Day could be especially unpredictable.
The day can increase volumes so much that sometimes it makes it difficult to tell whether a stock is moving because of contracts expiring or business fundamentals. While a Witching Day doesn’t automatically mean more volatility in the market, some traders-especially new ones, choose to sit the day out.

The third Friday in March this year is tomorrow 18 March.

Scotomas are related to the neurological signals being sent from your eye to your brain. Anomalies in these neurological messages to your brain cause what looks like auras or blind spots as you look at the world around you.

Scotomization is a psychological term for the mental blocking of unwanted perceptions, analogous to the visual blindness of an actual scotoma. So, unwanted perceptions are scotomized.

Under the title ‘Waterstones/Blackwells: book-opoly?’ there is this piece in The Week. It is more than usually relevant to me because there is a Waterstones in Cambridge and also a Heffers bookshop. Which will be kept? Can Cambridge support two of them, my guess is that Heffers has been suffering. It is partly the location, but also the approach. It is just more fun in Waterstones.

Here is the article:

There’s nothing like a good book to distract from problems – especially if you’re the US activist hedge fund Elliott Advisors, which has suffered a series of setbacks in its efforts to shake up Britain’s pharma and housebuilding sectors. Bookselling, though, is a different story, said Ian Johnstone in the FT.

The UK’s largest book chain, Waterstones, which Elliott has owned since 2018, is close to buying its smaller rival Blackwell’s-“expanding its dominance” in the sector just as “sales experience a revival”. Last year, UK book sales reached their highest point in a decade, according to Neilsen data, with 212 million print copies sold.

The move brings Blackwell’s, with 18 stores including its Oxford flagship, under the same ownership as Foyles and Barnes & Noble, said The Bookseller. “Some indie booksellers” have “expressed concern” about the growth of Waterstones. But most are pleased to see family-owned Blackwell’s ” rehomed safely” after years of losses.

Page 41, The Week 5 March 2022

The Local Council replaced the two newly planted trees on Jesus Green here in Cambridge that didn’t make it through their first year. The two trees planted in their place are Cercis siliquastrum (Judas tree) and Liriodendron tulipifera (Tulip tree).

The generic name Cercis comes from the Greek kerkis, meaning a shuttle, which refers to the resemblance of the seed pods to a weaver’s shuttle. And siliquastrum means a pod. So really it is the pod-pod tree.

According to Wikipedia, the botanical name Liriodendron comes from the Greek and means a lily tree, And tulipiferawhich means to bring forth tulips, because its flowers resemble a tulip. In the right soil conditions it can grow to 55m and more. That will be a sight.

“She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting”
Detransition Baby Torrey Peters

[Navigating the complicated waters of family-making and motherhood in the twenty-first century, this exciting and very funny debut follows the lives of three trans women living in New York.]

Full Circle wholefoods sell chickpea flour. So I looked for recipes – and that’s how I found out that chickpeas in their different types are also called gram, Bengal gram, garbanzo beans, and Egyptian peas. So chickpeas are garbanzo beans. Who knew?