We swept the entire economic calendar since 2010. Exactly one place pays

contact@mulhamfetna.com (Mulham Fetna) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scheduled economic news — inflation prints, jobs reports, rate decisions, oil inventories — moves futures markets violently. Every trading course says so, and it’s true. We wanted the question nobody answers with a complete sample: which of these moves can you actually get paid for, after real costs?

So we tested all of it. Not the promising ones — all of it.

The sweep
#

Three waves, each pre-registered before running: first 612 market×news pairs on nine futures markets against the full calendar since 2010; then the secondary series (11,822 additional news moments); finally a literal closure census of all 661 remaining series×instrument cells, so that every combination in our registry has a recorded verdict — positive, negative-with-power, or honestly “underpowered, no verdict”. Costs stressed on every table.

The answer: one place
#

The US CPI (inflation) release, on equity-index futures. That’s it. The market jumps on many things; it pays on this one:

Long NQ (Nasdaq futures), entering 300 seconds before the release, fixed stop and target: +$133 per event net of stressed costs, t = 4.13 — and it survives a Bonferroni correction across all 54 cells of that study design.
ES (S&P futures) riding CPI alone: 116 events, +$151.37 per event at $52.50 of stressed costs, p = 0.0027, the release jump 20.5× the quiet baseline, both sample halves positive, control floor and a 1,000-placebo noise check green. Recent regime (2024–2026): +$529 per event.
The premium is ordered exactly by index sensitivity: Nasdaq > S&P > Dow > Russell. It is an equity-index phenomenon — the same event on gold or oil pays nothing.

flowchart LR
    NQ["NQ · Nasdaq
most index-sensitive
largest premium"] --> ES["ES · S&P 500"]
    ES --> YM["YM · Dow"]
    YM --> RTY["RTY · Russell
smallest premium"]
    RTY -.-> X["GC · CL · NG …
same event,
pays nothing"]

The graveyard (equally important)
#

Of the 661-cell closing census, exactly one cell came out exploratory-positive. 179 cells are significant negatives — and here’s the instructive part: 41% of those lose purely to costs (their gross edge is within $5 of zero), and 29% are actually gross-positive before friction. The market really does move; the move really is bigger than quiet times; and the spread eats it. Violence is not premium.

Macro-News on Mulham Fetna

We swept the entire economic calendar since 2010. Exactly one place pays

The sweep #

The answer: one place #

The graveyard (equally important) #

The sweep
#

The answer: one place
#

The graveyard (equally important)
#