About Severity

Every headline is scored on an integer scale from 0 to 10 by the triage model. Higher numbers mean larger expected market impact across commodities, currencies, equities, and crypto.

Default alert threshold is 5. Headlines below 4 are recorded but not analyzed. The examples below are illustrative anchors, not an exhaustive list.

10
Civilizational
Events that would reorder the global financial system.
  • Major-power kinetic conflict
  • Nuclear use
  • Collapse of reserve-currency issuer
9
Systemic shock
Once-a-decade events that move every major asset class.
  • War opening between large states
  • Assassination of G7/G20 leader
  • Systemic bank run
  • Reserve stablecoin (USDT/USDC) sustained depeg
  • Coordinated multi-port strike halting transpacific or transatlantic trade
  • Catastrophic nation-state cyber attack on US/EU power grid
  • Sweeping global ban on frontier model training
8
Regional crisis
Sharp, large-scale dislocations in a specific region or sector.
  • Regional war opening
  • Closure of critical maritime chokepoint (Hormuz, Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Bosphorus)
  • Top-3 crypto exchange insolvency
  • OPEC+ surprise emergency cut/expansion
  • Major reserve-currency intervention
  • TSMC Fab-18 multi-week outage
  • Sovereign-led model-weights theft from frontier lab
  • Full GPU export ban (US↔China) extended to design tools
7
Major event
Sector-defining disruptions with multi-week macro implications.
  • Major sanctions regime
  • Coup in top-10 oil/copper/grain producer
  • Magnitude-8+ earthquake near capital
  • Top-10 exchange hack with material customer loss
  • Panama Canal severe transit cut
  • Major LNG terminal outage
  • Pandemic-tier livestock-disease outbreak in a top exporter
  • Hyperscaler global outage >6h affecting payments/healthcare/aviation
  • Nation-state-level supply-chain compromise (xz-utils-style) on critical infra
  • Frontier-lab safety incident triggering operational halt
6
Significant
Important market-moving events; sector- or asset-specific impact.
  • Significant sanctions
  • Gas/oil pipeline cut
  • Major hurricane at refinery or LNG cluster
  • Major DeFi protocol exploit (>$500M)
  • Top-tier copper/iron-ore mine collapse or extended strike
  • Key-port strike (US West Coast, Hamburg, Shanghai)
  • WASDE/USDA crop-condition shock
  • HPAI (avian flu) sweeping a major poultry state
  • Major chip export-control tightening
  • Antitrust forced-divestment ruling against a top-5 platform
  • Ransomware on a national hospital system
  • Credible net-energy-gain fusion replication
5
Notable
The default alert threshold — meaningful events worth flagging.
  • Cross-border military incident
  • Meaningful trade-war escalation
  • Central-bank emergency action
  • Sweeping crypto enforcement action (e.g. broad SEC complaint against a top-5 venue)
  • Mid-tier mine outage
  • Coffee/cocoa/sugar origin shock (Brazil drought, Côte d'Ivoire disease)
  • Container-shipping rate spike >30% on a major lane
  • Mega M&A block ($25B+) or surprise approval with structural concentration impact
  • Sovereign AI regulation passing with model-licensing teeth
  • Multi-region or cross-provider cloud outage with named cross-sector spillover
  • Credible frontier capability jump with answerable market mechanism
4
Minor
Below the analysis threshold — recorded but not deeply analyzed.
  • Minor disaster
  • Diplomatic expulsion
  • Commodity-export restriction (single country, single crop)
  • Mid-tier exchange security incident
  • Smaller-stablecoin depeg
  • Refinery fire of regional significance
  • Localized crop disease
3
Update
Ongoing story with limited fresh information.
  • Continuation of a previously-recorded story without new market mechanism
2
Routine
Background activity that informs context but doesn't move markets.
  • Background political tension
  • Routine crypto regulatory commentary
  • Routine WASDE/EIA/IEA inventory print
1
Background
Routine business and political news; not actionable on its own.
  • Routine political/economic news
  • Product/partnership/fundraising announcements
  • Routine corporate earnings
  • Routine model releases (GPT-X.5, Claude N+1, Gemini point releases)
  • AI product launches
  • Benchmark improvements that aren't capability-discontinuous
  • LK-99 / cold-fusion-style claims without independent replication
0
Noise
Irrelevant to black-swan analysis — discarded.

Frontier-breakthrough guardrail. Quantum milestones, fusion replication, novel ML architectures, battery / superconductor breakthroughs, robotics foundation models, biotech approvals, and reusable-launch step-changes qualify at sev ≥ 6 ONLY when (1) the source is credible (peer-reviewed paper, major-lab announcement with replication, regulatory approval — viral tweets and unreplicated pre-prints do not qualify) AND (2) the market mechanism is answerable (you can state who gains, who loses, and on what timeline).

A single headline can be scored across multiple topics simultaneously, with a different severity in each. The same event can be sev 8 in its kinetic-phase frame and sev 4 in a priced-in spillover frame.