Two real, dated events land back to back in the middle of September: the Consumer Price Index for August 2026 is released Friday, September 11, and the Federal Reserve’s rate decision follows the FOMC meeting on September 16. As of the most recent CME FedWatch reading, markets are now pricing a rate hike as the single most likely outcome, roughly 59%, a real reversal from the roughly 70% odds of a hold that prevailed before Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish Jackson Hole remarks in late August. That’s a genuinely unsettled setup, and this account’s own recent history already shows what weeks like this tend to do to the market this strategy trades, including living through the exact reversal behind that number.

What’s actually scheduled

  • Friday, September 11: August CPI, the last full inflation read before the Fed meets.
  • Tuesday-Wednesday, September 15-16: FOMC meeting, rate decision Wednesday at 2:00 PM ET, alongside updated economic projections.

Why the market isn’t pricing a cut this time

The dominant story through most of this summer was cooling data pushing rate-cut hopes higher: a weak July jobs report and softer-than-expected CPI both fed that narrative through August, covered in the week of August 10 and the weeks before it. Heading into this Fed week, the read has done more than shift, it’s reversed outright: prediction markets now price a hike as the single most likely outcome, not a hold and certainly not a cut. That reversal traces to one specific, dated event, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish Jackson Hole remarks in late August, which this account’s own trade log documents in real time: a short SPX call that went about $1,000 underwater on paper as the index rallied, then flipped into the week’s biggest win the moment Warsh’s remarks turned the tape. That’s not a headline read after the fact. It’s the actual mechanism behind the number cited above.

What a week like this has actually done to this account before

This account doesn’t trade the news directly, but its real trade log shows what these kinds of macro-driven weeks tend to produce. Record highs and record-setting rallies have squeezed short call positions before, most notably the week of August 3, when a record-setting S&P rally pressured the call side of a carried /ES strangle into a real, managed loss. Unsettled, choppy weeks have also produced real losses on the SPX 0DTE side, as in the week of August 10, when ordinary short-term chop, not a specific headline, stopped out two same-day spreads. The lesson from both: this account’s exposure to Fed-week volatility isn’t about predicting the outcome, it’s about how the existing positions (a carried /ES strangle, daily SPX 0DTE cycles) sit relative to wherever the index actually goes, cut or no cut.

How this account actually approaches a week like this

Nothing exotic: the same defined-risk structure, the same position sizing, the same daily 0DTE cadence this record documents week after week. If anything, the honest adjustment for a week carrying two back-to-back binary-ish events is using lower deltas on new 0DTE entries and giving genuinely more weight to stop discipline on anything carried over the CPI print or the FOMC decision itself, the same adjustment this account arrived at the expensive way during tuition week in July.

Takeaway

A Fed week with a rate hike now priced as the more likely outcome, right after a summer of rate-cut optimism, is exactly the kind of unsettled stretch this account’s own record shows can move sharply in either direction without a single clean headline to explain it. The plan isn’t to predict CPI or the FOMC decision. It’s to keep running the same sized, defined-risk positions this account always runs, and to size new entries with the reminder, learned more than once now, that an ordinary-looking week can still move enough to matter.