Quadruple witching, a pandemic, a recession, and a stock market that is looking for reasons to add to an epic recovery from the impact of the coronavirus. Could those factors make for a volatile cocktail for the stock market in coming days and weeks?

Quadruple witching, occurs on the third Friday of the month of every quarter, in March, June, September, and December, and refers to the simultaneous expiration of single-stock options, single-stock futures, and stock-index options and stock-futures.

Equities have already experienced a bout of renewed volatility last Thursday that may have cracked Wall Street’s bullish patina, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.15% tumbling 7% and the S&P 500 SPX, +0.05% tanking by 6%.

However, Friday’s quad witching period, could mark the start of a further bumpy patch for the market, including the rebalancing of Russell indexes, which concludes on June 26, and the start of a new batch of quarterly corporate earnings reports in mid July.

“Markets have become a battleground over the past week between the bulls and the bears,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at National Securities Corporation, told MarketWatch.

“Expirations tend to be volatile by their nature, and I would suspect this go around will likely be no exception,” Hogan said.