What if AI melt-up: Nasdaq adds 20% in a quarter on capex optimism?
A blow-off rally in AI infrastructure names drives the Nasdaq up ~20% in three months as investors extrapolate datacenter spend. Falling VIX and surging risk appetite mark a classic late-cycle euphoria.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-on shock. A blow-off rally in AI infrastructure names drives the Nasdaq up ~20% in three months as investors extrapolate datacenter spend. Falling VIX and surging risk appetite mark a classic late-cycle euphoria. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Volatility (VIX) ▼ · AI breakthrough ▲ · AI capex ▲ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.