What if restaurant traffic falls off a cliff?
Double-digit declines in QSR/casual-dining traffic as consumers cook at home sink the restaurant equity group — the trade is short franchised QSR and casual dining (McDonald's relative resilience vs. Cheesecake/Texas Roadhouse beta) and a tell on low-end consumer health. Rhymes with 2008-09, when traffic fell and casual dining (full-service) underperformed value QSR. Skeptical: trade-down to QSR cushions the leaders, so the group splits; the uniform high-beta crypto cascade overstates a broad-market read of a sector-specific consumer signal.
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-off shock. Quick-service and casual dining traffic falls double digits as squeezed consumers cook at home, sinking the restaurant equity group. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Recession signal ▲ · Consumer spending ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.