What if a rare-earth-magnet bottleneck stalls the humanoid-robot ramp?
An actuator / rare-earth-magnet bottleneck caps the humanoid ramp: Nvidia, TSMC and the semi complex sell as the deployment story stalls, and the disinflation thesis pauses. Closest analogue is the Oct-2024 ASML bookings-miss chip-equipment shock, which exposed how a single supply constraint repriced the complex. Transmission runs through China's ~90% grip on processed rare earths/NdFeB magnets. Forward angle: the real chokepoint is magnets and precision actuators, not GPUs — the cascade over-weights silicon; the cleaner short is the assemblers and the cleaner long is rare-earth supply ex-China.
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. An actuator / rare-earth-magnet bottleneck constrains the humanoid-robot ramp. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Robotics productivity ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.