What if a popular uprising topples Iran's Islamic Republic?
The clean trade is the Brent term-structure: a regime-change tail keeps front-month backwardation bid on Strait-of-Hormuz/chaos risk even as headlines flirt with supply normalization. Rhymes with the 1979 Iranian revolution, when 'lost' Iranian barrels and panic doubled crude despite ample paper supply. Forward angle: unlike 1979, Iran is already near-fully sanctioned, so the bull case is contagion to Iraqi/Gulf transit, not Iranian exports per se.
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. Sustained uprising topples the Islamic Republic, oil plunges on supply-normalization hopes then spikes on chaos risk. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.