Energy & Commodities mixed · 6–18 months
A what‑if from the future

What if disease ends the cocoa glut overnight?

A swollen-shoot/black-pod outbreak in Ivory Coast and Ghana (~60% of world cocoa) reverses the 2026 glut and rockets cocoa off its lows — long cocoa is the trade; the wheat/corn-led cascade misreads a single-commodity disease shock. Rhymes with the 2023-24 West Africa disease/weather crisis that sent cocoa to ~$12,000, a historic squeeze. Transmission: chocolate makers (Hershey, Lindt, Mondelez) eat margin pain and pass through to CPI. Forward: swollen-shoot permanently kills trees, so the supply hole persists years — structurally bullish, not a transient pop.

32%
our model probability
over 6–18 months
prediction markets — the market's odds
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Anchored to measured history 32% · 90% range 18–45% · 40 dated precedents behind it — a wider range means thinner evidence

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 6–18 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…

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What it would mean

If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A severe swollen-shoot and black-pod outbreak hits Ivory Coast and Ghana, abruptly reversing the 2026 glut and rocketing cocoa off its lows. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.

Methodology. Probability and impact are anchored to history and scored against what actually happens — wins and losses, in public, at Reality Check. Market odds live from Polymarket & Kalshi. By Vikas Singh, Quantitative Strategist. Updated 2026-08-13.