What if a cheap drone swarm strikes critical infrastructure?
A drone-swarm refinery/airport strike is the cleanest oil-supply-risk trade in the book: long Brent over WTI (Gulf premium), long crack spreads (jet/diesel/gasoline) and energy equity, short Nasdaq beta into the vol spike. The Sep-2019 Abqaiq attack is the precise analogue — Brent gapped ~15% intraday before mean-reverting once Saudi spare capacity refilled. Forward angle: cheap-drone asymmetry means the risk premium is stickier than 2019 because the marginal attacker cost is near-zero, so fade the spike less aggressively.
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-off shock. A swarm of cheap drones strikes a refinery or airport, exposing critical-infrastructure vulnerability and grounding civil aviation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.