What if a summer-spec switch squeezes US gasoline supplies?
Summer-spec RVP switchover plus refinery glitches drains US gasoline ahead of driving season, blowing out RBOB cracks while crude lags; the trade is long gasoline cracks, not flat Brent. Rhymes with recurring spring gasoline-crack spikes (e.g. 2022 and 2024 pre-Memorial-Day draws) driven by the seasonal spec change and unplanned outages, with crude largely a spectator. Forward angle: thinner US refining slack post-closures makes the seasonal switchover bottleneck sharper in 2026; capture it via the gasoline crack rather than chasing flat price.
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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 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 mixed shock. Summer-spec switchover plus refinery glitches drains US gasoline inventories ahead of driving season. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil demand ▲ · Gasoline ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.