Why Maya Trades Straight Through FOMC, CPI, and PPI

What ten years of data said about sitting out the big macro days, and why it surprised us.

Ask almost any options trader what to do on a Fed decision day and you will hear the same advice: stand aside. Wait for the dust to settle. Do not let a CPI print or a press conference blow up your book. It feels like common sense, and common sense is exactly the kind of thing we test before we trust it.

So we tested it. We took roughly a decade of market history and asked a simple question: if Maya had refused to open new positions around the calendar's loudest macro events, the FOMC rate decisions, the CPI and PPI inflation releases, and the other scheduled heavyweights, would the strategy have ended up better off?

The result that caught us off guard

When we layered a rule on top of the strategy that paused new entries around scheduled macro events, the long-run return did not improve. It fell. The avoided days were not a clean basket of disasters waiting to happen. They were an ordinary mix of up days, down days, and nothing-much days, and a meaningful share of them were among the better entry windows of the year.

That is the part the intuition misses. A volatile day is not the same as a losing day. Maya enters defined-risk bull call spreads, so the downside on any single position is already capped before the news ever hits. What an FOMC or CPI day actually brings is movement, and Maya is a strategy that gets paid when the names on its watchlist move higher. Cutting those days out of the calendar removed good entries alongside the scary-looking ones, and the good ones were carrying their weight.

Why "sit out the news" sounds smart but tests poorly

The advice to dodge macro events is built on a story, not a measurement. The story goes that surprises are dangerous, danger means loss, so removing the surprise removes the loss. Each link in that chain feels reasonable. The trouble is that the chain never gets checked against what really happened across hundreds of these events.

When you do check it, the danger turns out to be already handled elsewhere. Maya's protection lives in how each trade is structured and how the broader book is sized to conditions, not in trying to guess which calendar dates will be calm. A spread with a known maximum loss does not need to fear a headline the way a naked position does. So the "protection" of skipping the day buys very little, while the cost of skipping it, all the entries left on the table, shows up clearly in the final number.

The scoreboard that settles the argument

Debating whether to trade through the news is only interesting until you look at the results. Here is what the strategy actually produced across seven years of backtesting, trading through every Fed decision and inflation print in that window instead of hiding from them.

Six of the seven years finished higher, several of them by a wide margin, and the strategy compounded at roughly a third per year over the stretch. That kind of curve is built by letting the winners run while the losers get cut early and small, then doing it across thousands of trades so the math has room to work. None of it comes from dodging the calendar. It comes from showing up on every day the rules say to show up.

What sitting out the news would have cost, year by year

We did not stop at a single number. We ran the same seven years three different ways on the identical trade list: Maya trading through every event as it normally does, a version that paused new entries on the big three releases (Fed rate decisions, CPI, and the jobs report), and a version that paused on every scheduled high-impact event on the calendar. The dollars settle it.

Read across any row and the same thing happens: the rule that sat out the calendar finished with less money. Skipping only the marquee events cost $18,931 over the seven years. Skipping the entire high-impact calendar gave back $65,625, better than a third of the total return. Avoidance helped in exactly one year, 2022, the only losing year in the set, where it trimmed the loss from $5,543 to $3,151. That single softer loss was nowhere near worth the six years of winners it would have clipped along the way.

Why this leaves most discretionary traders behind

The typical discretionary trader does the reverse of everything above. They get big when they feel confident and freeze when they feel scared, which tends to leave them smallest right before the market hands out its best entries and largest right before it punishes them. A Fed day is where that emotional swing does the most damage, because the fear is loudest exactly when the opportunity is richest. Most people sell their discipline at the worst possible moment and call it caution.

Maya feels none of that. Position size is set by measured conditions rather than by mood, entries are taken the moment the data clears them, and the identical playbook runs whether the calendar is empty or the whole desk is holding its breath. Taking the human nervous system out of the loop is not a gimmick. It is the reason the bars in that chart look the way they do, and it is the gap that opens up between a system that never flinches and a person who has to.

What this says about the whole approach

This is a small example of a habit that runs through everything Maya does. Plenty of ideas feel right in conversation and fall apart under measurement. Exit at fifty percent profit to lock in gains. Tighten up before earnings season. Wait for confirmation after a scary day. Each one gets the same treatment: build it, run it across years of real history, and keep it only if the evidence agrees.

The macro-event test is one we are glad we ran, precisely because the result was uncomfortable. It would have been easy to add an FOMC pause and tell ourselves we were being prudent. The data asked us to do the harder thing, which was to leave the strategy alone and let it keep working on the days that scare everyone else.

Maya does not have a view on what the Fed will say at two o'clock. It has a record of what tends to happen when it stays invested, and that record is what it follows.