What if OPEC+ fractures and Saudi Arabia launches a price war?
An OPEC+ break-up with Saudi flooding the market collapses Brent/WTI, crushing energy equities and breakevens while fuel-levered airlines (UAL) rally on lower input costs. The textbook analogue is the Mar-2020 Saudi-Russia price war that halved crude in weeks, and the 2014-16 'defend share' crash. Forward angle: a deflationary oil shock would also pull forward Fed cuts, so it reads risk-on for duration and consumers even as the energy complex is liquidated.
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-on shock. OPEC+ cohesion collapses; Saudi Arabia floods the market in a price war. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.