What if a palace coup topples the House of Saud?
A Saudi succession crisis throws the swing producer's output policy into doubt, bidding Brent ~6% and refined products while VIX spikes and Nasdaq sells. No clean modern analogue — the closest behavioral rhyme is the 2019 Abqaiq drone strike (Brent +15% intraday, then retraced as Saudi restored output fast). Forward angle: with US shale as marginal supplier and OPEC+ holding spare capacity, a pure governance shock without physical outage should see the oil premium bleed faster than the 1970s instinct suggests; the durable trade is long vol, not long crude.
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 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 palace coup destabilizes the House of Saud, throwing OPEC oil policy into doubt. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.