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.
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 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.
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 | Volatility (VIX) VIXon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Vol | ▲ +6.4% hist +0.61–+6.91% · other way -0.36% (n=12) |
| 2 | Brent crude BRENTon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +3.6% hist -0.47–+2.32% · other way -3.03% (n=12) |
| 3 | WTI crude CLon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +3.0% hist -4.65–+1.77% · other way -2.56% (n=12) |
| 4 | Nasdaq 100 NDXon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Index | ▼ -2.8% hist -1.72–-0.5% · other way -0.34% (n=12) |
| 5 | Energy sector XLEon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▲ +2.1% hist -0.08–+1.26% · other way -1.36% (n=12) |
| 6 | Tech sector XLK 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -2.2% hist -1.28–-0.57% · other way -0.15% (n=12) |
| 7 | S&P 500 SPXon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Index | ▼ -1.5% hist -1.09–-0.5% · other way +1.22% (n=12) |
| 8 | United Airlines UAL 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -1.8% hist -2.3–+2.04% · other way +8.11% (n=12) |
| 9 | ExxonMobil XOM 📈 chart | Equity | ▲ +1.5% hist +0.13–+1.79% · other way -2.15% (n=12) |
| 10 | Chevron CVX 📈 chart | Equity | ▲ +1.4% hist +0.37–+1.03% · other way +0.18% (n=12) |
| 11 | Delta DAL 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -1.5% hist -1.32–+1.05% · other way +4.5% (n=12) |
| 12 | Semiconductors SMHon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -1.3% hist -0.99–-0.34% · other way +1.95% (n=12) |
| 13 | MicroStrategy MSTRon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -1.3% hist -2.81–+4.12% · other way +31.53% (n=12) |
| 14 | Solana SOLon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Crypto | ▼ -1.0% hist -1.62–+1.19% · other way -3.0% (n=12) |
Probable recommendation
Why we may diverge from history
Trust the cascade longs on CL and BRENT: history's negatives are 2014/2020 OPEC price-war glut windows, the inverse of a refinery-strike supply shock; COIN/HOOD/MSTR history is just clustered June-2025 Iran-window BTC beta.
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COIN COIN | LONG | +12.0% · 5d +3.5% | 77% | 12 | 0.47 | ⚠ differs |
| HOOD HOOD | LONG | +8.2% · 5d +0.3% | 77% | 12 | 0.46 | ⚠ differs |
| CL CL | SHORT | -4.9% · 5d -2.6% | 70% | 25 | 0.36 | ⚠ differs |
| CNY CNY | SHORT | -0.6% · 5d -0.1% | 69% | 25 | 0.36 | ✓ matches cascade |
| NDX NDX | SHORT | -0.6% · 5d -0.9% | 72% | 32 | 0.34 | ✓ matches cascade |
| MU MU | SHORT | -4.2% · 5d -4.8% | 70% | 32 | 0.31 | ✓ matches cascade |
| MRVL MRVL | SHORT | -1.2% · 5d -3.4% | 70% | 25 | 0.30 | ✓ matches cascade |
| INTC INTC | SHORT | -3.6% · 5d -2.3% | 68% | 36 | 0.30 | ✓ matches cascade |
| Volatility VIX | LONG | +3.6% · 5d +4.5% | 66% | 29 | 0.29 | ✓ matches cascade |
| AMD AMD | SHORT | -1.3% · 5d -0.8% | 69% | 36 | 0.29 | ✓ matches cascade |
| ETH ETH | SHORT | -4.6% · 5d -3.9% | 65% | 17 | 0.21 | ✓ matches cascade |
| NVDA NVDA | SHORT | -1.9% · 5d -4.8% | 62% | 26 | 0.21 | ✓ matches cascade |
| SOL SOL | LONG | +1.8% · 5d -5.2% ↺ fades | 65% | 12 | 0.19 | ⚠ differs |
| High-yield credit HYG | SHORT | -0.6% · 5d -0.1% | 62% | 22 | 0.19 | ✓ matches cascade |
Why this probability
Drone-swarm infra strikes increasingly common (Ukraine, Gulf); grounding aviation higher bar; short window. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.