What if an exchange cancels a day of trades after a squeeze?
An exchange cancelling a day of trades after a squeeze destroys trust and pushes volume off-exchange — the trade is a liquidity/credibility hit to that venue and wider bid-ask in the affected metal, with the miner (Freeport) a modest tracker. Direct rhyme: the LME's March-2022 nickel cancellation, which drove volumes away, invited lawsuits, and impaired the exchange's franchise for years. Skeptical: the macro spillover is small and venue-specific; the cascade's broad credit/crypto legs overstate it. Roots are acceptable for a contained metals-microstructure event.
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. An exchange cancels a day of nickel-style trades after a squeeze, destroying trust and driving volume off-exchange. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.