Using Contra

The framework's full pattern library — the mechanisms, triggers, and magnitude rubrics — is member content and requires a free registration. This FAQ exists precisely to answer the common questions in plain language publicly. The distinction is deliberate: the educational explanations are open; the operational detail that took years of specification work lives behind the login.

Watchlists, theses, conclusions, and linked-brokerage positions exist to power your own surfaces — the Portfolio X-Ray, prior-decay flags, and resolution tracking. Cohort Insight aggregates member conclusions anonymously and only above a minimum sample size. Brokerage connections are read-only. You can delete your account, and its data, from Account settings.

Yes — and Contra actively manages it. When you store a thesis on a ticker, the engine watches it for decay: if it hasn't been touched in 90 days, if the price has moved 25% either way since you wrote it, or if the pattern composite has materially shifted, an amber "prior thesis aged — re-evaluate" flag appears. The platform never deletes or overrides your reasoning; it just refuses to let a stale prior masquerade as a current one.

Deletion is permanent — once you delete your account from Account settings, your watchlists, theses, conclusions, and linked-position history are removed and cannot be recovered afterward. If you're unsure whether you want everything gone rather than certain, downgrading to the free tier instead of deleting outright preserves your account and its history while simply pausing paid access — the reversible option when you might want to come back.

Your individual position data powers your own account surfaces — the Portfolio X-Ray, prior-decay flags, resolution tracking — and nothing more on its own. Where you've opted into Cohort Insight, it's your recorded CONCLUSIONS, not your raw positions, that contribute anonymously to the aggregated cohort read once enough members have concluded on a given ticker. The full, authoritative detail on what's collected and how it's handled lives in the platform's own privacy policy, which governs beyond this plain-language summary.

Cohort Insight shows you what other Contra members concluded when they looked at the same evidence — aggregated and anonymized. When members work through a firing and record a conclusion (act, pass, watch), those conclusions accumulate into a cohort read per ticker. It is not a buy/sell vote or a sentiment meter; it is a record of what people who saw the same patterns decided, which is useful precisely when your own conclusion differs.

Operator and Activist subscribers contribute conclusions; viewing the aggregated cohort read is an Activist feature. A ticker's cohort view appears once enough members have recorded conclusions on it — below that threshold the surface stays empty rather than displaying statistically meaningless counts.

Because not enough members have concluded on that ticker yet. Contra deliberately withholds cohort aggregates until the sample is large enough to mean something — a "cohort read" built from three opinions is noise wearing a chart. As the member base grows, coverage widens organically.

No, and the distinction is structural. A sentiment tracker aggregates whatever people happen to post publicly — comments, upvotes, mentions — with no requirement that anyone posting actually looked at specific evidence before opining. Cohort Insight only counts a conclusion recorded by a member who engaged with a specific firing and explicitly logged act, pass, or watch against it — it's a record of decisions made after examining the same evidence you're examining, not a measure of ambient chatter or hype cycling through social media. That makes it a narrower, and structurally different, kind of signal than any public-sentiment feed.

Only the aggregate, and that's a deliberate design choice. Cohort Insight is built to surface a pattern of collective judgment, not to expose or attribute any individual member's specific call. Conclusions are anonymized before they are aggregated, so what you see is a cohort-level read — how many members concluded which way on a given ticker — rather than a feed of named opinions you could follow or copy. That keeps the surface useful as a collective data point without turning it into a social or influencer dynamic, which the platform is deliberately built to avoid.

Yes — this is one of the things Contra is built to do. Link your brokerage (read-only) and Contra reads your real, closed trades and tests them for the habits that quietly cost retail investors money: selling winners early while letting losers run, chasing a stock after it has already moved, selling on a price scare instead of a broken thesis, re-buying a name that just burned you, and buying names the framework was flagging to avoid. Each habit it finds comes with the number behind it and the training drill that targets it.

It reconstructs your round trips — each buy matched to the sell that closed it — from your linked brokerage history, then runs a set of falsifiable behavioral checks over them. A habit is only flagged once there are enough trades to say anything real; below that threshold Contra tells you it needs more data rather than guessing. Nothing here is advice about what to buy or sell — it is a mirror on how you have traded, so the same mistake stops costing you twice.

No. The Live Tape, the Codex, the training tools, and the IPO Desk all work without linking anything. Linking a brokerage (read-only) is what unlocks the personal layer — your bias report, the Graveyard, and the discipline scorecard — because those are read from your own trades. Contra can never place a trade or move money; the connection is read-only.

You get an honest "not enough data yet" rather than a forced or fabricated read. Each behavioral check carries its own minimum-sample threshold before Contra will flag a habit, because a pattern claimed from two or three trades is closer to noise than signal — the same discipline the framework applies to a market-wide archetype applies here to your own trading history. As more of your closed round trips accumulate in your linked brokerage, the checks that were previously unreadable start clearing their threshold and populate on their own; there's nothing to manually trigger.

It reads your brokerage's available trade history at the time you link, not just activity from the moment of linking onward — SnapTrade typically pulls back a meaningful window of past transactions, so most of your existing closed round trips are visible to the bias checks right away rather than requiring you to wait months for new trades to accumulate. Exactly how far back that available history reaches depends on what your specific brokerage makes available through the connection, which varies by broker.

Yes. Contra supports read-only brokerage linking through SnapTrade on both paid plans (Operator and Activist). Once linked, the Portfolio X-Ray reads your actual positions and runs the pattern engine across them — showing which of your holdings have patterns firing, at what magnitude, and in which direction. Linking replaces manual CSV uploads for keeping your portfolio view current.

SnapTrade connects 30+ brokerages across the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Australia, and India. US names include Robinhood, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, E*Trade, Interactive Brokers, Webull, Chase, Wells Fargo, Public, moomoo, tastytrade, and Empower; Canadian investors can link Wealthsimple, Questrade, or TD Direct Investing; internationally, Trading 212, DEGIRO, AJ Bell, eToro, CommSec, Stake, and Zerodha are supported, among others. The authoritative, always-current list is maintained by SnapTrade at support.snaptrade.com/brokerages. Contra imports equity positions (stocks, ETFs, ADRs, closed-end funds, mutual funds) — the pattern engine covers listed equities, so crypto-exchange balances are not imported.

The connection is read-only: Contra can see positions, not touch them. It cannot place trades, move money, or change anything in your brokerage account — and it never will, because Contra is an educational platform, not an advisor or broker. If you prefer not to link at all, you can still add positions manually (or upload a CSV on the Activist plan) or maintain watchlists; the analysis is identical.

It answers the question most brokerage apps can't: "what is happening underneath the tickers I own?" For each holding, the X-Ray shows active pattern firings — insider activity, margin trends, capital-allocation events, retail-protection flags — plus the composite tier the framework assigns. It also flags stored theses that have aged: if you saved a reason for owning a stock and the facts have since moved, the prior-decay flag tells you to re-examine rather than autopilot.

Unlinking stops the live connection immediately — Contra no longer pulls new position data from that brokerage, and the Portfolio X-Ray going forward reflects only whatever positions you've since added manually or via CSV. It doesn't retroactively erase the analysis history built from the positions that were linked, since a firing or tier reading is the same regardless of how the underlying ticker got added to your account; what stops is the automatic sync, not the past record. You can re-link the same brokerage at any time to resume automatic updates without losing anything in between.

Implied volatility is how big a price swing the options market is pricing in over the next month — a calm reading means traders expect an ordinary move, a high reading means they're bracing for something bigger in either direction. The put/call open-interest ratio compares how many contracts are outstanding betting on a decline (puts) against how many are betting on a rise (calls); a ratio well above one leans bearish, well below one leans bullish, and near one is balanced. Short interest is the share of a company's tradable float currently sold short — money betting the price falls — and days to cover is how many typical trading days it would take every short seller to buy back their shares at once, which is the rough fuel supply behind a squeeze if the stock rallies hard. None of these are the framework's own verdict; they describe what other market participants are positioned for right now, alongside the pattern-based read.

A short squeeze happens when a heavily-shorted stock starts rising and short sellers are forced to buy shares back to limit their losses — that forced buying pushes the price up further, which forces more covering, and the loop feeds itself until the shorts are largely out. A gamma squeeze is a related but separate mechanism: it starts with call-option buying rather than short selling, and forces market makers (not short sellers) to buy the underlying stock to hedge the calls they've sold. The two can happen together — heavy short interest and heavy call buying on the same name at once — which is part of what made the 2021 GameStop episode so extreme, but a stock can have either without the other. Heavy short interest paired with a long days-to-cover figure is the setup for the first; a put/call ratio swinging toward calls while dealers sit short gamma is the setup for the second.

Neither reading is a signal on its own, and the panel is deliberately descriptive rather than advisory — it tells you what the crowd is positioned for, not what to do about it. Heavy short interest can mean informed investors have identified a real problem the market hasn't priced in yet, or it can mean a crowded, fragile bet that unwinds violently the moment the thesis wobbles; the framework's own pattern reads, not the short-interest number itself, are what actually judge which is which for a given company. The same goes for implied volatility — it often just reflects a scheduled event like earnings, and an elevated reading on its own says nothing about direction. Read either alongside the framework's tier and the firings behind it, never as a standalone buy or sell trigger.

Both carry risks a plain long stock position doesn't. Buying a call or put can lose your entire premium if the stock doesn't move far enough before the contract expires — a faster, more binary loss than owning the stock outright, and most retail options buyers lose money on a position even when they're right about direction, because they're also fighting time decay and need to be right about timing. Selling a stock short is the sharper risk of the two: the loss is theoretically unbounded, because there's no ceiling on how high a stock can rise, whereas the most you can lose owning a stock outright is the 100% you paid for it. Both typically require your broker's approval — a margin account for shorting, an options-trading tier for options — and both are generally meant to be sized far smaller than an equivalent long-stock bet for exactly that reason. Contra doesn't place these trades for you; reading the panel's positioning data before you act through your own broker, and sizing any options or short position deliberately small, is the discipline that keeps either from being the trade that wipes out a portfolio.

It's purely descriptive context and does not itself drive any pattern firing — the panel exists to show what other market participants are positioned for, kept deliberately separate from the framework's own falsifiable, mechanism-based patterns rather than blended into one combined signal. A stock can carry extreme short interest or unusually elevated implied volatility while the framework itself stays silent, because no falsifiable pattern has actually triggered on the underlying business; conversely, a pattern can fire on perfectly ordinary options positioning with nothing unusual in the short-interest data at all. Reading the two together gives you a fuller picture — the market's crowd positioning alongside the framework's own evidence-based read — but they answer genuinely different questions, and one never substitutes for the other.

There is a free tier: it includes the Gauntlet training scenarios (194 of them, 28 at the expert level), the Time Machine, five Live Tape reads a month with the rating-change dots, the Codex and this FAQ, and a first read of your own habits — the six that can be seen from a holdings snapshot, plus the two that come from your own calls on the Conviction Slider. That is enough to learn how the framework thinks and see it operate on live names. Full framework access, and the seven habits that can only be read from real trades, start with the Operator subscription.

Operator ($29/month) unlocks the full framework: unlimited Live Tape with the four ratings (ENGAGE, QUALITY, MONITOR, AVOID) and the rating-change dots, ticker pages, the pattern engine across your watchlists and portfolio, the War Room with the Decision Graveyard, and your trading habits read from your real trades — from a linked brokerage or a CSV that carries your sells — with a daily watch on each one and a Graveyard filter that shows the exact trades behind a habit. It also adds the commodity and bond tapes with their investor guides and the Pre-Market Tape email, which now carries a one-line bias check. Activist ($99/month, with an annual option) adds what the habits cost in dollars, their trend over time, an exit rule per habit, decision-time nudges on the Conviction Slider, Position Intelligence, Telegram alerts and a daily digest that includes your habits, Cohort Insight viewing, the Interrogator's full dialogue mode, and visibility into framework evolution — the change log of how patterns get promoted, refined, and retired. Capability tiers (Novice through Expert) are separate: they are earned through the Gauntlet, never purchased.

No. Contra is an educational platform that teaches pattern recognition and shows you evidence — it does not tell you what to buy or sell, does not manage money, and does not produce price targets. Every surface is built around the same principle: the framework flags falsifiable conditions, explains the mechanism, and the decision stays yours.

Yes — plan changes are self-serve from Account settings and take effect on your normal billing cycle, whether you're upgrading from Operator to Activist to unlock the War Room and Cohort Insight, or downgrading if you no longer need those Activist-tier surfaces. Your saved watchlists, theses, and capability-tier progress carry over unchanged regardless of which subscription plan you're on, since those live at the account level rather than being tied to whichever plan you happen to be paying for.

Yes — the annual option is priced below twelve months of the monthly rate, the standard tradeoff of a lower effective cost in exchange for committing upfront rather than paying month to month. You can switch between monthly and annual billing from Account settings at any time; a switch takes effect at your next renewal, and your saved data, watchlists, and capability-tier progress are unaffected by which billing cadence you're on.

A firing means one of the framework's falsifiable patterns has met its trigger conditions on a specific ticker — a cluster of insiders bought, a spin-off entered its mispricing window, inventory started outrunning sales. Each firing carries a direction (bullish, bearish, or context-dependent), a magnitude (weak, medium, or strong — shown as one to three dots), and a horizon (the realistic time the mechanism takes to play out). A firing is evidence, not an instruction.

M1 (one dot) means the trigger barely cleared its threshold — real but weak, and weak firings deliberately do not move classifications. M2 (two dots) is a standard, clean trigger. M3 (three dots) means the trigger fired with amplifying conditions on top — multiple insiders and the CFO buying, or a spin-off discount plus forced selling. Magnitude feeds the composite math: a strong firing carries three times the weight of a weak one.

They are the framework's composite reads after weighing every active firing on a ticker. Engage means bullish evidence outweighs bearish at least three to one with no retail-protection flags — it marks where the evidence is strongest, not an instruction to trade. Quality means bullish but not decisively. Monitor means contested evidence. Avoid comes in two flavors — operational (bearish patterns dominate) and retail-protection (a pattern designed to protect retail investors fired strongly, which overrides everything else). And Correct Silent means no meaningful pattern is firing — the framework says nothing rather than manufacturing a view.

Because silence is a feature. Most stocks most of the time have no falsifiable pattern active — and a framework that always has an opinion is a framework you can't trust when it matters. Contra classifies those names Correct Silent explicitly. Roughly a quarter of the framework's validated historical performance comes from staying appropriately silent rather than firing on noise.

Yes, and it happens routinely — it's exactly what the composite math exists to handle. A company can genuinely have real insider buying (bullish) alongside a real margin-compression signal (bearish) at the same moment, because those are two independent, falsifiable facts about the business that can be true simultaneously. The composite tier weighs every active firing together, factoring in each one's magnitude, so a stock with strong bullish evidence and only weak bearish evidence lands in a different tier than one where the two sides are evenly matched. Monitor exists specifically for that contested case — real evidence on both sides, with neither dominating the other.

Simple mode is the default way Contra presents itself: the same pattern engine, translated into plain narrative. Instead of a terminal-dense row of archetype IDs, magnitude pills, and composite weights, a Simple card tells you what the pattern means in one or two sentences, with the key number wrapped in context — "revenue has grown ~14% a year for a decade; only about 1 in 20 companies ever sustain that." Nothing is hidden or dumbed down; the same firings drive both views. New accounts start in Simple mode.

The toggle lives in your Account settings and applies across the web app and mobile. Pro mode restores the full terminal presentation: archetype IDs (like III.01 or X.10), M1/M2/M3 magnitude dots, composite bull/bear weights, and the five-tier classification labels. Simple mode keeps the same underlying verdicts but renders them as plain-language cards. You can flip between the two at any time — your watchlists, theses, and history are identical in both.

No. Both modes read from the same engine output — the same firings, the same magnitudes, the same tier classification. Simple mode is a translation layer, not a different product. The design principle is comprehension, not reduction: a Simple card keeps the numbers but explains what they mean, while a Pro row assumes you already know what a strong insider-buying cluster implies. If a verdict differs between your phone and your desktop, that is a bug, not a feature of the mode.

Engine Health is a Simple-mode summary of how the pattern engine has been performing: it condenses resolution tracking — how often recent firings moved in the direction the pattern implied — into a single plain-language read. It exists because "trust me" is not an argument; the engine keeps score on itself and shows you the score. Pro mode exposes the underlying resolution accuracy figures directly.

No — nothing is removed, only re-presented. Every number Pro mode displays — magnitude, composite weight, tier classification — is computed identically in Simple mode; it is simply translated into a plain sentence instead of a terminal row rather than being hidden or discarded. If you want to see the raw figures behind a particular Simple-mode callout, switching to Pro mode on the same ticker shows exactly what fed that sentence. The two modes are two windows onto identical output, not two different depths of analysis, so there is nothing to lose by starting in Simple and switching later, or vice versa.

Yes. Contra is available for both iPhone (via the App Store) and Android (via Google Play). The mobile app carries the core surfaces — the Live Tape, ticker pages, watchlists, and pattern cards — with the same Simple/Pro mode preference you set on the web. The web app at contraterminal.com is also mobile-first and installable as a progressive web app on any phone, if you'd rather not install a native app at all.

Yes — same engine, same firings, same verdicts. The mobile app reads from the same backend the web app uses, and the pattern catalog is synchronized between the two so a firing you see on your phone matches what your desktop shows. Watchlists, saved theses, and your Simple/Pro preference sync across devices through your account.

Both the web and mobile apps support dark and light themes, with a system-follow option. Dark is the native Contra look; light mode is a full repaint rather than an afterthought. You can set the preference during onboarding or change it any time in Account settings.

Brokerage linking works from either surface, since the connection itself is account-level rather than device-level — link through SnapTrade once, from whichever surface is more convenient, and the Portfolio X-Ray reflects the same linked positions on both web and mobile immediately afterward. There is no separate mobile-only or web-only linking flow to manage, and you don't need to re-link if you switch devices.

Yes — the app can notify you when a pattern's magnitude clears a genuine threshold on a ticker you're watching, or hold if you've linked your brokerage, and the notification preference is configurable in Account settings so you aren't pinged on every weak firing. You can scope alerts to a meaningful magnitude — M2 or M3 — rather than seeing every M1 that clears the bar on names you actually care about. The preference is shared across devices tied to your account, the same way your Simple/Pro setting is.

The Gauntlet is Contra's training ground: a pool of scenario exercises built from real historical setups, each engineered around a specific cognitive bias — anchoring, recency, loss aversion, narrative seduction. You are shown the evidence an investor had at the time and asked what you'd do; the scenario then resolves and scores you. Some scenarios are traps to avoid, others are opportunities most people miss, and a meaningful number test whether you can recognize when doing nothing is correct.

Your capability tier — Novice, Developing, Proficient, Expert — advances as you clear Gauntlet scenarios of increasing difficulty. It measures demonstrated pattern-recognition skill, and it cannot be bought: subscription tier and capability tier are deliberately separate axes. An Expert-capability free user and a Novice-capability Activist subscriber are both possible, and the platform treats that as working exactly as intended.

The Time Machine drops you into a historical moment — blinded, with the ticker and date masked — and lets you evaluate the evidence as it existed then, without hindsight. You commit to a read, then the scenario unblinds and shows what actually happened. It is the antidote to "I would have seen it coming": across more than a hundred scenarios, you find out empirically whether you would have.

Capability tier reflects demonstrated skill accumulated across many scenarios, so a single wrong read on one Gauntlet exercise doesn't demote you — the tier is built from a pattern of performance over time rather than any one result. What can happen is that your tier simply stops advancing if you stop engaging with new, harder scenarios, since the tier measures demonstrated skill against progressively more difficult material rather than functioning as a credential earned once and then held indefinitely regardless of later inactivity.

They're built from real historical setups — actual companies, actual disclosed evidence at the time, actual outcomes — not synthetic or randomly generated situations. The specific ticker and date are typically masked while you're working through a scenario, the same blinding the Time Machine uses, so you're judging the evidence on its merits rather than pattern-matching against a company you already have an opinion about. What unblinds afterward is a real, verifiable historical event, not a simulation constructed to make a point.

The Graveyard is where your past trades come to be judged — objectively, by the numbers. It splits into two: the positions you exited (every closed round trip, graded on how well you timed the sell) and the passes you logged (things you decided not to buy, scored on what happened next). Alongside the trades sits your bias report and a discipline scorecard, so the whole picture of how you have actually traded lives in one place.

Exit capture answers one question about a sale: of all the gain that was on the table around your trade, how much did you actually walk away with? Contra looks at the best price the stock reached from your entry through the months after you sold, and scores your sale against it. Selling near a good local high scores well even if the stock later runs higher — it is a fairer test of your timing than "what if you had never sold." Green means you captured most of the move, red means you sold well off the best.

A pass is graded on what actually happened to the stock after you decided to skip it — if it went on to do poorly, your pass was well-timed; if it ran meaningfully higher, the pass cost you a real opportunity, and the Graveyard says so plainly rather than only ever grading the trades you actually made. This is the half of trading discipline that's easy to overlook entirely, since a trade you never made leaves no position to look back on — the Graveyard closes that blind spot deliberately, logging the pass at the moment you make it and scoring it against the same objective yardstick used for an actual sale.

The window is bounded to a period of months after your sale, not years, because the point is to test whether you sold near a genuine, nearby local peak rather than to penalize you for failing to predict a multi-year future you had no visibility into at the time. A stock that eventually multiplies several years after you sold is a different question entirely from whether your specific sale captured the gain realistically on the table in the weeks and months around it — the Graveyard is built to answer the second question, not the first.

A low score describes the outcome of a sale, not necessarily the quality of the decision behind it — selling on legitimate information at the time, like a broken thesis or a real risk that materialized, can still score poorly if the stock happened to keep rising anyway for unrelated reasons, and that's a genuine limitation of any purely outcome-based grade. The Graveyard is deliberately paired with your bias report and discipline scorecard rather than left to stand alone, precisely so a single unlucky outcome doesn't get mistaken for a bad process — the pattern across many trades, not any one grade, is what actually tells you something about your habits.

Contra is a set of tools that work together. The Live Tape shows what fired across stocks, commodities, and bonds each morning. The Codex is the open library explaining every pattern. The IPO Desk covers big listings in dated facts. The War Room watches your holdings against the framework daily, and the Graveyard grades the trades you have closed. To build skill there is the Gauntlet (a diagnostic that names your biases), the Time Machine (blinded historical replays), the Interrogator (the strongest counter-argument to your own thesis), and the Conviction Slider (position sizing with deliberate friction). The ETF X-Ray shows what is firing inside your funds, and Cohort Insight shows where other investors are leaning.

The Live Tape is the whole market, read every morning — what fired across stocks, commodities, and bonds, scored into a verdict per name. The War Room is your slice of it: your holdings and watchlist read against the same framework, plus the personal layer that comes from linking a brokerage — your bias report, the Graveyard, and your discipline record. The Live Tape tells you what the market is doing; the War Room tells you what it means for you, and what your own trading reveals.

It's entirely fine to use only what's useful to you — the tools aren't a sequence you have to complete, they're a set built to serve different needs, and someone who just wants a daily read on the market has everything they need in the Live Tape alone. The training tools (Gauntlet, Time Machine, Interrogator, Conviction Slider) exist specifically for building skill over time, and the personal tools (War Room, Graveyard, capability profile) exist specifically for the linked-brokerage layer; neither set is required to get value from the core pattern-reading surfaces.

The Interrogator is built around your specific thesis rather than the framework's own aggregated firings — you state why you think a stock is a buy or a sell, and it constructs the strongest available counter-argument to that exact reasoning, drawing on the same underlying evidence the Live Tape has but organized as a direct challenge to your stated logic rather than as a neutral list of bearish firings. Reading the Live Tape's bearish evidence passively is easy to skim past; having a specific counter-argument aimed at the specific reasoning you just wrote down is harder to wave off, which is precisely the friction the tool is designed to create.

It works on any fund with disclosed holdings, passive index ETFs included — a passive fund's holdings are just as real an exposure as an active fund's, and the X-Ray reads what's firing across whatever a specific ETF actually holds regardless of whether that fund is picking stocks or tracking an index. That matters most for an index investor who assumes broad diversification means broad safety; the X-Ray can still show that a seemingly diversified index fund is quietly concentrated in names carrying the same pattern, which a headline description of the index alone wouldn't reveal.

It is a reverse valuation lens: instead of guessing what a stock is worth, Contra works backwards from the current price and asks what growth the market is already paying for. If a stock's price only makes sense if revenue compounds ~14% a year for a decade, that is the bar the business has to clear before you make anything. The callout then grounds that bar in base rates — how many companies of that size have ever actually sustained it.

No, and this matters. A price target says "this stock will go to X" — a prediction Contra never makes. The implied-expectations read says "at today's price, the market is assuming Y" — a statement of fact you can check against history. The difference is direction: targets project forward from an analyst's model; implied expectations decode what is already embedded in the price. One is a forecast; the other is arithmetic plus base rates.

Across the platform: as a callout on Live Tape cards, in the Interrogator when it challenges a bullish thesis ("the price already assumes the outcome you're describing"), as a rollup across your War Room holdings, and inside the Conviction Slider — where committing to a high-conviction position in a stock priced for perfection adds deliberate friction. Simple mode phrases it as a plain sentence; Pro mode shows the underlying assumption figures.

Because the AI infrastructure cycle has produced a wide spread between businesses and the expectations embedded in their prices. Two companies with identical AI exposure can carry entirely different embedded assumptions — one priced for ordinary growth, the other priced for a decade of near-record compounding. The implied-expectations lens separates "good company" from "price that already assumes everything going right," which is the distinction that decides returns from here.

No — the implied-expectations read is context, not a standalone verdict, and it doesn't override the composite evidence classification on its own. A stock can be priced for a demanding growth rate and still carry Engage-worthy evidence if the company's own disclosed trajectory is genuinely tracking toward clearing that bar; the callout exists to make the bar visible, not to layer a separate valuation judgment on top of the evidence-based tier. What it does change is how much margin for error a bullish thesis actually has: a company growing into a demanding embedded assumption has far less room for a stumble than one priced for something ordinary, and that risk context is what the lens adds — not a rating of its own.

Contra reads three markets, not just stocks. The Live Tape scans the equity market (individual stocks and the ETFs built on them), the commodity market (energy, metals, and agricultural cycles), and the fixed-income market (the Treasury curve, credit spreads, inflation expectations, and the policy-rate path). Each gets read for the patterns that actually move it, and the framework grows every week — new patterns and new names are added continuously rather than shipped in one fixed set.

Yes. Contra reads the commodity market as its own asset class — where each major commodity sits in its cycle, and the equities most exposed to that cycle turning. Commodity-cycle patterns fire on the Live Tape alongside the stock patterns, so a turn in an underlying commodity and its read-through to the exposed producers show up together.

Yes. Contra reads the fixed-income market — the shape of the Treasury curve, credit spreads, inflation expectations, and where the policy rate is heading — and connects rate-regime shifts to the stocks and sectors they hit hardest. Because the same regime that moves bonds also moves rate-sensitive equities, reading them together is the point.

Crypto is read through the equity lens rather than as its own standalone asset class alongside stocks, commodities, and fixed income. Crypto-treasury companies, exchange operators, and miners are covered as equities with their own specific patterns — including the reflexive premium-to-NAV cycle that crypto-treasury vehicles are prone to — and Bitcoin's own price shows up as an input wherever it drives a covered stock's behavior. There is no separate crypto-spot Live Tape the way there is for the three asset classes above; the coverage is the equities genuinely exposed to crypto, read for the mechanisms specific to that exposure.

Coverage is not US-only. The framework reads foreign filers, including companies that don't file with the SEC directly, using whatever authoritative disclosure regime applies to them — annual reports, foreign-private-issuer filings, and the equivalent regulatory filings from other jurisdictions. The universe grows continuously and isn't limited to any single exchange or country, so if a particular international name isn't yet covered, that typically reflects the framework not having reached it yet rather than a deliberate country-level exclusion.

The capability profile is a living picture of how you read the market, mapped across nine skills — reading a business, spotting structure and moats, reading the numbers, following the smart money, holding the right horizon, weighing customer treatment, sizing bets, reading what models can do, and judging when a setup actually pays off. A short diagnostic sets your starting point, and from there the profile moves with your real behavior: training drills, the calls you make, and the trades in your linked brokerage all nudge it.

Your skill grows from what you actually do, not a quiz you game once. Completing the diagnostic sets a baseline; after that, blinded historical replays, your bullish/bearish calls on the Live Tape once they play out, and your real trades each move the relevant skills up or down. Good exits and disciplined entries lift the score; habits like selling winners early pull it down — and the score heals as the habit fades, because it is recomputed from your recent record.

Because "good at investing" isn't a single skill, and collapsing it into one number would hide exactly the information that's most useful. An investor can be excellent at reading a business's numbers and consistently poor at sizing positions, or sharp at spotting structural moats but reliably wrong about time horizon — those are genuinely different weaknesses that call for different training. Separating the profile into nine distinct axes lets you see precisely where your own edge is strong and where it's thin, rather than one blended figure that could be masking a serious, fixable gap behind an otherwise solid average.

No — the profile doesn't reset on inactivity, but it is recomputed from your recent record rather than functioning as a permanent, one-time-earned credential, so a long gap without new drills, calls, or trades simply means the profile stops updating rather than reverting downward. When you come back and start engaging again, the profile resumes moving from wherever it last stood, weighted toward your more recent activity as it accumulates.

Yes — the diagnostic and the blinded historical replays (the Time Machine, the Gauntlet) don't require a linked brokerage or any real trading history at all, so someone who has never placed a trade can still build a genuine, demonstrated skill profile purely from how they read masked historical evidence and score their calls on the Live Tape. Linking a brokerage adds the personal layer built from real trades, but it isn't a prerequisite for the profile to exist or to be meaningful — the training-only path is a complete, self-contained way to build and demonstrate the same nine skills.