What if Simandou floods the market and sinks iron ore?
Simandou hitting ~120Mtpa floods seaborne iron ore and drives it below $80/t — the clean move is iron ore, Rio/BHP/Vale/Fortescue equities and bulk-shipping demand lower, with copper a modest negative read-through. Rhymes with the 2014-15 iron-ore crash to ~$40 when Pilbara expansion met slowing China steel. Forward angle: layering Guinean tonnage onto a structurally weakening Chinese property/steel cycle is doubly bearish — unlike 2015, demand is in secular decline not a cyclical dip, so the price reset is durable; short the high-cost producers and AUD as the macro proxy.
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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 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 mixed shock. Simandou hits full ~120Mtpa run-rate, flooding seaborne supply and driving iron ore below $80 per tonne. :: The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.