What if the Houthis sink a US destroyer in the Red Sea?
A Houthi missile sinking a US destroyer forces major naval retaliation — Brent bid on Red Sea/Bab-el-Mandeb risk, vol up, equity sold. Closest analogue: the 2024 Red Sea shipping campaign that rerouted traffic around the Cape and lifted freight and Brent modestly, without a sustained crude spike. Forward angle: a sunk US warship is a casus-belli escalation versus harassment — the discontinuity is a direct US-Iran exchange, which would move the oil premium far more than the shipping disruption itself.
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 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 risk-off shock. Houthi anti-ship missile strikes and sinks a US destroyer in the Red Sea, triggering major naval retaliation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.