What if Panama Canal drought re-disrupts grain and diesel freight?
A fresh El Niño drought drops Gatún Lake and slashes Panama Canal draft/transits, rerouting US grain and product cargoes and lifting freight and diesel.
32%
our model probability over 0–6 months
prediction markets — wisdom of the crowd
loading live odds…
◎ Empirically anchored 32%· 90% range 15–49%· 40 analogues · measured class energy 52% in 6 mo · 3% held back for the unknownhow we built this number — every step
Measured class rate — energy ≈1.4869/yr → 52% in 6 mo52%
Analyst prior · editorial share 69% of the class36%
Pooled · weight 87%33%
Crowd — no liquid market—
Reserve 3% · no extremizing (×1.0)33%
Published32%
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
loading the timeline…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A fresh El Niño drought drops Gatún Lake and slashes Panama Canal draft/transits, rerouting US grain and product cargoes and lifting freight and diesel. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Diesel ▲ · Food inflation ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
Market
Class
Projected move
1
WheatWHEATon Hyperliquid📈 chart
Commodity
▲ +0.4%
hist +0.03–+0.44% · other way +0.18% (n=12)
2
CornCORNon Hyperliquid📈 chart
Commodity
▲ +0.3%
hist -0.25–+1.42% · other way +0.2% (n=12)
Probable recommendation
If the scenario above plays out, the probable cross‑asset positioning → a scenario‑conditional read, not personalized investment advice
For a common-man portfolio: Mixed for a typical portfolio — the move is more about rotation than direction. Favour the winners over the losers below rather than net exposure.
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
Chernobyl disaster 1986-04↗Silver Thursday 1980-03↗Gold peaks at $850 1980-01↗1979 Iranian Revolution oil shock 1979-01↗Gold tops $4,000 and silver spikes past $50 in historic squeeze 2025-10↗H5N1 bird flu record US egg prices 2025-04↗Gold tops $3,000 for the first time amid tariff and rate-cut fears 2025-03↗Henry Hub natural gas falls to an all-time inflation-adjusted low on record output 2024-11↗Gold tops $2,500 for the first time on Fed rate-cut bets 2024-08↗Niger coup d'etat 2023-07↗PJM grid emergency during Winter Storm Elliott 2022-12↗August 2022 hot CPI 2022-09↗Powell's hawkish 'pain' speech at Jackson Hole 2022-08↗Turkish lira record low on rate cuts 2021-11↗European gas crisis intraday record spike 2021-10↗Texas grid failure during Winter Storm Uri 2021-02↗Gold closes above $2,000/oz for the first time 2020-08↗Norilsk Nickel Arctic diesel spill 2020-05↗WTI crude futures settle negative as demand collapses 2020-04↗IPBES warns ~1 million species face extinction 2019-05↗February 2018 hot wage print triggers rate scare 2018-02↗North Korea sixth nuclear test 2017-09↗North Korea 'fire and fury' nuclear scare 2017-08↗Gold futures velocity-logic flash crash 2014-01↗Gold all-time peak of $1,921/oz 2011-09↗Egyptian revolution / Mubarak uprising 2011-01↗Oil collapses from $147 to the $30s as the GFC craters demand 2008-12↗Crude oil all-time high 2008-07↗Henry Hub natural gas spot price peaks during 2008 commodity boom 2008-07↗2008 global rice / food price crisis peak 2008-04↗2008 global rice crisis: Thai benchmark tops $1,000/ton 2008-04↗Platinum hits all-time record near $2,290 on South African power crisis 2008-03↗South Africa Eskom power emergency spikes platinum/PGMs 2008-01↗Amaranth Advisors natural-gas blowup 2006-09↗Northeast blackout cascading grid failure hits ~55 million 2003-08↗Soviet August coup attempt against Gorbachev 1991-08↗Argentina hyperinflation peak / Alfonsin early handover 1989-07↗Iran hostage crisis / US freezes Iranian assets 1979-11↗Volcker Saturday Night Special 1979-10↗Three Mile Island partial meltdown 1979-03↗