Geopolitics
Geopolitics and conflict
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.
Strait of Hormuz
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 entryTaiwan Strait
A 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 entryRussia sanctions
Sanctions 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 entryCeasefires and peace deals
This 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 entryNATO defence spending
A 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 entryIran
Three separate questions trade under one country's name - the material, the fighting and the succession - and the contracts routinely treat them as one. They resolve on different documents, and two of them currently have no verification at all.
Open entryVenezuela
A market asking who leads a country assumes the question has one answer. Venezuela is the standing case where it does not - and where the resolution source, not the politics, decides the contract.
Open entryExport controls
Almost nothing here is banned outright. What changes is whether a licence application is presumed denied or reviewed case by case - a phrase in a policy document that moves billions without any rule being rewritten.
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How these markets resolve
- Publication of a specific legal instrument: a sanctions designation, an executive order, a UN resolution.
- A signed agreement text, not an announced intention to sign one.
- A named monitoring body confirming a condition held for a stated period.