What if companies freeze their software-seat spending?
A CFO-led seat-spending freeze and vendor consolidation cracks net-revenue-retention across mid-cap SaaS — a recession-demand signal, so the cascade pulls in financials, credit spreads and broad beta, not just tech. Analogue is the 2022–23 software-budget tightening when NRR compressed and high-multiple SaaS de-rated hard. Skeptical: the Lehman/COVID analogues overstate it — this is a margin/growth reset, not a solvency event; treat it as a multiple compression in unprofitable SaaS.
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…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. CFOs slash software budgets and consolidate vendors, triggering net-revenue-retention collapse across mid-cap SaaS. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.