What if a missile on NATO soil triggers Article 5?
Article-5 invocation is the fattest tail in the book: VIX +19, mechanical risk-parity delever crushes Nasdaq and the S&P while only a modest oil premium builds (Russia crude still flows). The rhyme is Feb-2022 Ukraine — equities sold, then rebounded once the conflict stayed contained and no NATO direct-fire materialized. Forward angle: unlike 2022, European defense budgets are already mobilized, so a defense-spend bid (not just a flight to bunds) partly cushions EU equities — the dip is shallower and faster to fade than the gut-reaction VIX print implies.
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 1–3 years 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 missile strikes NATO territory; Article 5 is invoked, raising direct NATO-Russia war risk. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ · Defense spending ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.