What if a hostile bid sparks a telecom takeover war?
A hostile bid for a major carrier is a sector M&A/event story — long the target and tower/wireless names, not a broad risk-on melt-up; crypto and SOL have no causal link to a telecom takeover. The cascade hijacks a generic risk_appetite template. Rhymes with the 2011 AT&T/T-Mobile attempt that DOJ blocked — antitrust is the dominant gate, so the trade is deal-spread, not beta.
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 mixed shock. A surprise hostile bid for a major US carrier ignites a multi-bidder war and a wireless-sector M&A scramble. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.