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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a free tier: it includes the Gauntlet training scenarios and a limited number of Live Tape views per month. That is enough to learn how the framework thinks and see it operate on live names. Full framework access starts with the Operator subscription.

Operator ($29/month) unlocks the full framework: unlimited Live Tape, ticker pages, the pattern engine across your watchlists and portfolio. Activist ($99/month, with an annual option) adds the War Room, 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.

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 verdicts after weighing every active firing on a ticker. BUY means bullish evidence outweighs bearish at least three to one with no retail-protection flags. Quality Operator 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.

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.

Yes. Contra is available on Android via Google Play, and an iOS release is in preparation. 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, so no one is locked out while the iOS release lands.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.