Geopolitics
These are the markets where the world and the wording disagree most often. A ceasefire that everyone reports is not automatically a ceasefire that resolves the market.
Geopolitical markets settle on official acts: a text signed, a designation published in a register, a body passing a resolution. Reporting runs ahead of those acts, and the gap between the two is where these markets are won and lost.
They also connect directly to the resources domain. Roughly a fifth of seaborne oil passes one strait; a single country refines most of the world's rare earths. Where the goods physically pass is often the same place the political risk sits.
A shipping lane two miles wide in each direction carries about a fifth of the world's petroleum liquids. There is no second route for most of it, which is why this stretch of water is priced into the oil market permanently.
Open entryA hundred-mile channel carrying a large share of world container traffic, next to an island that makes almost all of the world's most advanced chips. No other flashpoint concentrates that much of the global economy in one place.
Open entrySanctions are documents. A market about them is a market about whether a specific legal instrument gets published by a specific authority - not about whether relations improve.
Open entryThis is the family of markets where the world and the wording disagree most often. A ceasefire that every newspaper reports is not automatically a ceasefire that resolves a contract.
Open entryA ratio with a moving denominator, estimated by the alliance itself and revised afterwards. Every part of that sentence has decided a market at some point.
Open entry