A scheduled announcement does not walk the price. It jumps it.

Most event contracts get to their answer gradually. A story develops, a deadline approaches, and the price walks toward 0 or 100 as the picture fills in. You can watch it happen and you can usually get out on the way.

A contract tied to a scheduled announcement does not work like that. Nothing decisive happens for days, and then at one known minute the answer is published and the price goes from wherever it was to roughly where it will settle. There is no walk. There is a jump, and the space between the old price and the new one is not somewhere anyone trades.

The clearest live example this month is the US rate decision.

The October decision, as written

The Federal Reserve’s calendar lists the next FOMC meeting for 27 and 28 October, with the decision at 2:00pm Eastern on the 28th and the press conference at 2:30. Your Call evaluations trade Polymarket, and the event there for this meeting is built around that one timestamp.

Its rules, paraphrased closely from the venue’s own event data:

• The rate is defined as the upper bound of the target federal funds range, and the market resolves to how many basis points that upper bound changes by compared with its level before the meeting.
• The outcomes are buckets: a cut of 50 or more, a cut of 25, no change, a rise of 25, a rise of 50 or more. A change not shown as an option is rounded up to the nearest 25.
• If no statement is released by the end date of the next scheduled meeting, it resolves to no change.
• The resolution source listed on each market is the Federal Reserve’s own FOMC calendar page.

That is about as clean as resolution text gets. What the resolution criteria decide explains why that matters. This piece is about what happens to the price around it.

What the jump does to an open position

Suppose you hold YES on one bucket at 60 cents going into 2:00pm. At 1:59 the position is marked at around 60. At 2:01 it is marked near a dollar or near zero, and there may have been nothing in between to sell into. Resting quotes tend to be pulled and repriced in the seconds around a release, and the book that existed a minute earlier is not the book that exists now.

So the realistic range of outcomes for that position is not “somewhere around 60, plus or minus”. It is two points: most of a dollar, or nothing. Any resting exit order you left at 50 does not protect you at a jump, because the price need not trade at 50 on the way down. It can go straight past it.

That is the whole difference between a walking market and a jumping one. In the first, how much you can lose depends partly on how quickly you act. In the second, it is decided entirely by how much you put on before the minute arrived.

Why that matters more inside an evaluation

The daily limit sees the jump in full. Every account limit is measured on live equity, and the daily drawdown limit is 3% of account size, resetting at 5PM Eastern. A 2:00pm announcement lands in the same daily window as everything else you did that day. On a 50,000 account the limit is $1,500.

The capped upside makes expensive entries worse. Maximum profit from any single event is 0.5% of account size, which is $250 on a 50,000 account. The outlay that reaches that ceiling at entry price p is 250 × p ÷ (1 − p). At 40 cents that is $166.67. At 75 cents it is $750. At 80 cents, the top of the opening band, it is $1,000. If the announcement goes against you, the whole outlay goes, in one print. A single position sized to the cap at 80 cents can spend two thirds of a day’s limit in the time it takes the page to refresh.

One event, one cap, however many buckets. All five outcomes in the rate decision sit under one event, so they share one ceiling. Holding several buckets does not raise what the event can contribute toward the 10% Equity Growth Target. It only adds outlay, and every leg pays its own spread.

Related events resolve at the same minute. The same meeting carries other events: on Polymarket there is a separate event on how many members dissent. That is a different event with its own cap, and it is decided by the same statement in the same minute. Two caps, one moment. Twenty events is not twenty risks is about exactly that.

The band decides what you can hold

There is a further detail that is easy to miss. Opening orders are accepted between 0.20 and 0.80. When we checked the venue’s data around midday on 12 October, the no-change outcome was quoted at 83 bid, 84 offered, and the 25 basis point rise at 15 bid, 16 offered. The other three buckets were below one cent.

At those prices, none of the five outcomes could be opened on either side. YES on no change was above 80, and NO on it was below 20. The rise was the mirror image. Prices will have moved by the time you read this, and they may move into range before the meeting. But it is a useful reminder that one of the most closely watched macro events of the month is not automatically one you can trade inside an evaluation. The band was built to keep accounts away from the ends of the range, and a market that has mostly made up its mind sits at the ends.

What to do with this

None of this is a reason to trade scheduled releases or to avoid them. It is how they behave.

Size for the gap, not the mark. For any position you intend to hold through a known release, take its full outlay as the realistic loss, and ask whether you can absorb that alongside everything else open that day.

Count the release, not the tickets. Add up every position that the same announcement decides, across every event, and size the group as one.

Know the minute. The time is part of the position. A view that is correct on the 26th and a position held through 2:00pm on the 28th are different risks, and only one of them is shown on the tile.

Evaluations are conducted on simulated accounts. Not financial advice.