What if Canada's boreal megafires smoke out North America for weeks?
Boreal smoke-out is an air-quality/logistics hit: grounded flights, halted outdoor work, weaker discretionary/airline footfall — not a grain shock. The cleanest read is jet-fuel demand and airline load factors near affected hubs, plus short-lived insured-loss noise. Rhymes with June 2023, when Canadian wildfire smoke shut NYC-area flights for days with minimal lasting market impact. The wheat/corn cascade misroutes a transient mobility event into crops; effect fades in weeks.
how we built this number — every step
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A record boreal fire season blankets North American cities in smoke for weeks, halting flights and outdoor industry. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Jet fuel ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
| Market | Class | Projected move | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wheat WHEATon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +0.2% hist -1.43–+2.19% · other way -1.35% (n=5) |
| 2 | Corn CORNon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +0.2% hist -1.81–+5.04% · other way -6.38% (n=5) |
Probable recommendation
Why we may diverge from history
Trust the cascade's WHEAT long: the -2.3% realized comes from gold-squeeze and egg-price windows that never touched grain supply, so this smoke-driven crop disruption is on-channel and history is irrelevant noise.
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 15 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
| Asset | History says | Abnormal (20d · 5d) | Hit | n | Confidence | vs cascade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CORN CORN | LONG | +4.6% · 5d +0.2% | 73% | 14 | 0.44 | ✓ matches cascade |
| Gold XAU | LONG | +0.8% · 5d -0.1% ↺ fades | 63% | 14 | 0.25 | · |
| Volatility VIX | SHORT | -4.6% · 5d -2.8% | 60% | 14 | 0.14 | · |
| US dollar DXY | LONG | +0.2% · 5d -0.3% ↺ fades | 53% | 15 | 0.05 | · |
| WHEAT WHEAT | LONG | +2.2% · 5d +0.4% | 43% | 14 | 0.00 | ✓ matches cascade |
| Bitcoin BTC | LONG | +11.1% · 5d -0.8% ↺ fades | 50% | 8 | 0.00 | · |
| High-yield credit HYG | LONG | +1.2% · 5d -0.1% ↺ fades | 50% | 12 | 0.00 | · |
| 10y yield DGS10 | LONG | +2bp · 5d +2bp | 38% | 15 | 0.00 | · |
Why this probability
Boreal megafire smoke-outs now near-annual (2023 precedent); 0-6mo covers fire season. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.