What if a grounded tanker and piracy choke the Malacca Strait?
A Malacca closure strands Mideast crude and LNG bound for China, Japan and Korea, who route ~80% of imported oil through it; long Brent and Asian time-spreads, with North Asian LNG (JKM) the sharper move as cargoes cannot be rerouted quickly. No clean modern analogue, but the 2004 piracy spike and grounding fears echo here; flat price reacted little because alternatives (Lombok/Sunda) exist at a freight penalty. Forward angle: China's SPR builds and Sunda re-routing cap the premium, so play freight and JKM over flat Brent.
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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 Tail risk 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. A grounded supertanker plus piracy surge chokes the Malacca Strait, stranding Asia-bound crude and LNG cargoes. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — European energy ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.