Do S&P500 0DTEs Options Increase Market Volatility?
Recent market action has once again underscored how rapidly volatility can surface across asset classes, as evidenced by pronounced price swings in gold, silver, and cryptocurrency markets. Such episodes routinely revive debate within the quantitative community about structural drivers of intraday instability, with particular attention paid to the growing prominence of S&P 500 zero-days-to-expiration (0DTE) options. The rapid proliferation of these ultra-short-dated contracts has fueled concerns among practitioners, regulators, and exchange operators that concentrated option activity may transmit destabilizing hedging flows into the cash equity market. At the same time, the paper under review challenges this prevailing spillover hypothesis, suggesting that the availability of 0DTE options systematically alters market-makers’ hedging exposures in a way that may dampen, rather than amplify, realized index volatility. So, do 0DTE options truly increase market volatility?
