What if a copper squeeze forces violent backwardation?
Record-low LME stocks plus a dominant long cornering warrants drives cash-to-3M into violent backwardation — a financing/squeeze move that spikes nearby copper and Freeport while the curve inverts. Rhymes with the 2021 LME copper backwardation when Trafigura-era tightness sent spreads to ~$1,100, and the 1995 Sumitomo corner. Forward angle: thin LME inventory plus Comex-LME tariff arbitrage (post-2025 50% copper tariff) makes warrant squeezes more frequent — trade the spread, not flat price, as backwardation mean-reverts hard.
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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 Imminent 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 mixed shock. LME copper stocks hit record lows as a dominant long corners warrants, driving cash-to-three-month into violent backwardation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.