What if the LME suffers another nickel default?
Another LME nickel halt with cancelled trades is primarily an exchange-credibility/financial-plumbing shock — it widens nickel spreads and dents LME volumes, with copper/Freeport a tangential beta. Rhymes directly with the March-2022 LME nickel default when Tsingshan's short forced a halt and trade busts that drove participants to CME/SHFE. Forward angle: post-2022 reforms (price limits, OTC reporting) cap the squeeze mechanics, but Indonesian NPI oversupply means any spike is supply-driven and fades — the durable trade is migration of nickel liquidity away from the LME, not flat price.
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 mixed shock. A short-squeeze on low-grade nickel forces another LME trading halt and cancelled trades, shattering exchange credibility. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Financial conditions ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.