What if a coordinated attack destroys multiple grid substations?
A coordinated substation attack causing a prolonged regional blackout is a domestic risk-off and utilities/insurance event, not a commodity shock -- the generic VIX-up/Nasdaq-down cascade fits but understates the localized economic hit. Rhymes with the 2013 Metcalf substation sniper attack (a near-miss that drove grid-security spending) and the 2021 Texas grid failure's regional damage. Transmission: data centers, industrials and insurers in the affected economy; minimal cross-border channel. Forward: grid-hardening and security capex is the durable second-order trade.
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 1–3 years 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. Armed assaults destroy multiple high-voltage substations, causing a prolonged regional blackout in a major economy. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.