What problem does it solve?
Traders running Jason Shapiro's 3-step contrarian process (COT crowding detection, news-reaction failure analysis, weekly price-action confirmation) end up with three separate JSON reports and no consistent way to combine them into a single go/no-go decision. This Skill applies an explicit, exhaustively-tested precedence state machine to merge those verdicts into one actionable setup_status, failing closed on any missing, stale, malformed, or inconsistent input.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Sequential precedence state machine: Evaluates crowding, then news, then price-action in strict pipeline order, producing one of five statuses: READY_FOR_PLAN, WATCHING_PRICE, CROWDED, REJECTED, or INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE.
- Fail-closed input validation: Rejects unreadable, malformed, stale, symbol-mismatched, direction-mismatched, or non-finite-number reports with named reason tokens, never letting a bad input pass as a confirmation.
- Actionable output contract: At READY_FOR_PLAN, populates direction, gate_confidence, entry_trigger, and invalidation_level for handoff to a position-sizing stage, with JSON and Markdown reports written per run.
- Use Case: After running cot-contrarian-detector on B6 and getting CROWDED_SHORT, run the gate with the detector and news reports to learn the setup is REJECTED because the news-failure step came back NOT_CONFIRMED, stopping further analysis before any trade plan is built.
Quick Start
Run the gate script with your symbol, the cot-contrarian-detector JSON report, an explicit as-of date, and optionally the news and price-action reports to get a synthesized setup status.
