What if a coup in Pakistan puts its nuclear arsenal in doubt?
Loose nukes is a genuine tail, so the trade is a large VIX spike (the cascade's +11% is the biggest in this set) forcing risk-parity deleveraging and a 4% Nasdaq air-pocket, with gold and Treasuries the missing safe-haven legs. Closest rhyme is the Aug 2017 North Korea 'fire and fury' scare, which jolted the VIX and bid gold before fading. Transmission: Pakistan's instability directly pressures India (its rival neighbor) and Gulf funders; forward angle — a nuclear-security event has no clean precedent, so realized vol could overshoot the modeled move.
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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 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 coup in Pakistan puts the security of its nuclear arsenal in question. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.